Lake Norman Real Estate Friday Hot Sheet

January 23, 2009

 Above is a chart with today's "Hot Sheet" numbers from the Charlotte Multiple Listing Services for single family homes in Lake Norman (Area 13). These numbers represent a snapshot of the past TWO weeks of activity. As always, I have provided a two-week Hot Sheet from each of the prior 5 months for comparison with the exception of November when my blogsite was down. Here are the highlights: 

• New Listings have jumped up to the levels of last July.  At a time of significantly high levels of inventory of homes for sale in Lake Norman, this is not a positive sign.  This indicates that sellers are following traditional trends and putting their homes up for sale for the spring.  Unfortunately, this will only further exacerbate our struggling real estate market.

• The number of homes coming "Back on the Market" remains fairly consistent.  41 homes in the past two weeks came back on the market adding even more homes actively for sale.

• The number of price changes has increased since a drop during the holidays.  Prices are coming down as sellers and Realtors are facing this tough market.

• Pending sales are even lower than in December.  Since Pending sales are an indication of future closings, this would indicate our closed sales for the month of February are not going to increase.

• At 6 solds, I must admit I have checked this number twice.  Could our closed sales have dropped to one sixth of the number sold last month?  My only guess is that these would have been put under contract during the holidays and that closed sales will go back up at least to last months numbers.

• The number of contingent and conditional sales actually increased.  This would indicate that in the past two weeks more than twice the number of homes went under contract than sold. 

Clearly, the Lake Noman housing market is struggling even more than in prior months.  Today's Charlotte Observer Headline article:  "Plunge in home building getting deep in region"  provides even greater perspective on our regional housing market.  The silver lining is that with so little new construction our inventories are now about 2/3 resale homes.  Once we get those inventory numbers down and sales up, builders can begin to build. 

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