Ever since January of 2008, real estate agents in the Tucson area have been noticing that business is picking up. It turns out that the numbers are now starting to match our experiences out on the streets.
Median Sales Price
You may have noticed in the news recently that the median sales price is down to $199,900. This is a great statistic to make the news, but I personally hate median sales price calculations. It doesn't tell you the average price of homes, but instead reveals which end of the market is the most active. So in recent months, the lower end of the market is experiencing a lot of activity, while some (but not all) higher priced homes seem to be languishing on the market.
Home Sales Volume and Home Sales Units
Both of these categories decreased by about 28% or so. Even though we are seeing a rise in business lately, our market is not at the point where it was a year ago in terms of volume. It may take several months or a year to truly pick up its previous pace.
Average Sales Price
The average sales price increased about 1% from February 2007 to February 2008. This is not enough of a difference to really indicate much. For sellers' sakes, we can hope that this shows that prices will slowly start to increase, but if anything, it probably means that prices are not continuing to fall. We still have excess inventory, so I don't expect prices to go skyrocketing any time soon.
Active Listings
We had a 7% decrease in active listings, although new listings increased by 2.35%. Even though we had an increase in new listings, they are now being cleared off the market quickly enough that our overall active listings are down from a year ago. Keep in mind, though, that more homes were selling last year, so we still have some work to do to clear inventory if our goal is to be selling homes as quickly as we were in 2007. Buyers still have a lot to choose from and most buyers are presenting low-ball offers to see how the seller will respond.
Pending Contracts
Speaking of clearing homes off the market, our pending contracts increased by 20.38% in February 2008 as compared with February of 2007. All those buyers in January were not just looking - they were making purchases!!
Overall Analysis
For the past few months I have been noticing (and blogging about) the slow but steady turnaround in the Tucson market. We are seeing this trend continue and I don't expect Tucson to experience the continued pains that seem to be going through many other parts of the country. Remember when you hear reports about the real estate market: Real estate is like the weather - it is very LOCAL. You wouldn't wear rain gear in Tucson because there is a storm in Michigan. In the same way it doesn't make sense to expect our local market to perform like others around the country or even like the real estate markets in other cities in our state.
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