A Nice Up-Tick in New Listings and Pending Sales; While Sales Prices Remained Unchanged from Last Month.
With warmer weather coming into the area, we have seen a nice move up in both Active Listings and Pending Sales; while Closed Sales moved up only slightly; and the Average Sales Price also moved up slightly, as shown in our first graphic below:
The increase in Active Listings is a welcome improvement over last month, as the January statistic was only one (1) unit higher than January 2023! With the improvement in available homes to purchase, it is also a welcome sign to see strong improvement in the Pending Sales.
Our next graphic shows the 3 month rolling average trend for Pending Sales, covering the current year plus the 5 previous years:
This month we can clearly see a somewhat strong move upward in the 2024 trend, with January being much below the 2023 mark; while the February mark moved up strongly to almost catch the February 2023 mark. Clearly there are Home Buyers making a move, even at this still-high home loan interest rate levels.
Next up we show the 3-month Rolling Average Trend for the Number of Closed Sales:
This chart provides a nice look at the Year-to-Year Seasonality to our home sales market; as well as how Deep the current slump is. The date available here only goes back to 2009; and we are clearly at the lowest level during that time-span - which is even lower than the slump from the 2008/9 Great Financial Crisis! This month we do see the line turning upwards so, let's watch this in the coming months.
Our final chart shows the 3-month rolling average sales prices for existing home sales:
We are still in the now-Late Winter period of softer sales prices, and see the 3-month trend-line going in a moderately downward direction. The 12-month line however, is still showing some positive gains thus, we are still likely in a generally Up Market, as far as prices go.
Other Statistics for this month not shown in our graphics include: Active Inventory moved up slightly to 1.1 months (vs 1.0 last month); and Average Days on the Market fell by 3 days to 41.
With this Leap Year February giving us one more day of activity; this one extra day does not fully account for the nice increase in Active Listings and Pending Sales. We feel that if Interest Rates can moved down to a more reasonable level, we should expect a much higher level of home sales activity in the Vancouver Washington market after that change.
Thank you for viewing our update on the Vancouver WA real estate and home sales market for February 2024. Please don't hesitate to contact us of we can help you with your home sale or purchase in 2024!
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