If the bottom was last week, would you buy now?
Market Snapshot 2009/03/23
Is it market-rebound or spring? What's the difference? The difference would be the permanent change in market versus the seasonal change in buying activity. The ratios this week continued their tightening trend. We had a slight decrease in the number of homes available last week, reaching 3215, and this week the number available is still higher than two weeks ago, but moving away from last summer's high of 4159. The pending sales keeps rising too, reaching 579 this week. That is actually quite a bit less than the high last June of 675. The odd thing is that we aren't seeing a whole lot of change in the numbers that reflect actual sales. Last week we had 48 sales recorded in the system. Compare that to a high in August of 61 and a low in January of 18.
Interpretting the numbers isn't a straight-forward task. Especially when the total numbers of transactions are as small as ours are right now. So, some of those pendings may be sales, some may be failed sales that should be listed as active. While the ratios are helpful to suggest market trends, I dare say prices are going to be more affected by a change in actual closings. And that number isn't improving real fast.
With that being said, maybe there will be a surge in closings soon. I was noticing that many of the 'green certification' homes are still pending after many weeks. Why is that? Aha - they are under construction! That's why the big accumulation of pending? Stay tuned.
What about short-sales? Of the 3215 available homes, 794 require third-party approval (about 25%); we can assume 90% of those are short-sales. Of the same available number, 159 are bank-owned (about 5%). In the sold category, 5 of the 48 homes that closed were bank owned (about 10%). And 15 were short-sales (31%). Do you see something new here? Many weeks, we have more sold-bank-owned than sold-short-sales by a large percentage. Could this be a sign that the banks have started processing the short sales faster? Stay-tuned for next week's numbers!
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