Fellow agents, a methodology note that changed my read of this week's Madison County numbers.
Thirteen cancellations landed on my weekly pull for Aug 31–Sep 6. My first instinct was "builder pullback." Then I ran an address match against the same week's new listings and found that seven of the thirteen were cancel-and-relist — same address, same price, six of them new construction in Ashwood, Walnut Grove, and Boones Trace. Reposted the same week, zero price change. That's a DOM reset or an agreement renewal, not a terminated sale.
If you report the raw cancellation count to a nervous seller, you've just told them the market is failing when it isn't. The real cancellation count was six. The "new listings" count was inflated the same way, 46 on paper, ~39 in reality.
The other thing worth pulling apart: price-cut behavior on the listings that actually failed. In Berea, the cancelled listings had cut an average of 8.2% from original before giving up; in Richmond, 3.5%. That's the difference between a demand problem and a discipline problem, and between telling a Berea seller "your price found no buyers" and telling a Richmond seller "you never tested price."
Question for the group: do you dedupe cancel-and-relist out of your weekly counts before you show them to clients, or report raw and explain? I've started deduping. Curious how others handle Richmond and Berea builder relists.
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