Market Snapshot Vancouver and Clark County Washington 2010/10/04
Well, here are the numbers: In the city, we have 2820 active listings and 594 under contract, giving us a ratio of 4.75 to 1. This is slightly higher than last week. For Clark County, we have about 3857 active listings and 807 under contract for a ratio of 4.78 to 1. It, too, is a slightly higher ratio than last week. So what's it mean, Jellybean?
Here's my interpretation: New sales are slowing more than new listings. We are also getting a slightly higher mix of short-sale and bank-owned properties than we had around May - with about 36.4% being short or bank-owned compared to 32% in May. This isn't way out of the range we've been having in our area, so that's probably not something to be alarmed about. Recent news headlines have talked about some scandal-in-the-making because certain bank people were apparently signing homes into foreclosure without giving adequate consideration to supporting documents. I don't know what that might do to our market, but it's certainly telling that there are so many homes even being considered for foreclosure.
Are prices going up? I was reading an article recently that suggested home values might be "rebounding" in some areas of the country. It continued on and actually discredited that idea by explaining how the numbers that would create that impression were affected by the reality of short sales and people paying cash for homes. Besides, national numbers are one thing, what's going on in your neighborhood is another.
Active/pending ratios are a bit higher than this time last year. The ratios were 3.2 active for each 1 under contract at this time last year. It's a little tougher selling market now. Proportion of homes that are active and pending at different price points are the two additional graphs this week. As a reminder, these graphs show price-point proportions of total active and total pending.
So what for you? The value of seeing these trends each week are this: if you're selling, you're selling into a downward moving market and you should be pricing your home AHEAD of the market direction. So, if your market comparisons are showing up as $220,000 to $240,00, then you should price at $220,000. If you're buying, then you might consider looking some 3% to 5% over your actual target price as homes you're looking at now may be ready for a price adjustment. On the other hand, if you're looking, you'll probably know it when you come across a well priced home.
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