Weekly Buying Activity:
Pending Transactions: 6274 ( +568 from last week)
AWC Contracts: 1172 ( +57 from last week)
Total Contracts: 7446 ( +625 from last week)
Closed Transactions 3/31/08 1055 ( -210 from last week)
Active Listings: 55701 (+40 from last week)
MTD Sales: 630
Another strong week of buying activity. I know much of this is seasonal improvement, but it is showing very positive gains. Looking inside the numbers, we saw a very sharp jump in pending sales. Now, if pending sales are coming out of AWC contracts, that means even with the big number of AWC converting to pending, we had enough new contracts come in to more than replace them. That is a sure sign of strength. We have almost 7500 homes under contract, and that is a very workable number long term. We would all like to get back to the 11000 sales numbers of 2005, but that is probably not healthy long term, so if we can keep this pace, we will be doing well. The active stayed flat, which isn't helpful, as apparently many sellers are still putting homes on the market. I had hoped that the bulk of these sellers had already done so, but apparently not, as we are cutting into the active listings only very slowly.
New home sales are on a much slower pace than 1st quarter last year, but in the most recent week were up sharply. There are also seems to be fewer cancellations. While this could happen for any number of reasons, fewer cancellations leads to more confidence for builders and buyers, and could denote a settling down of the volatility of buyer emotions in the market.
This is an upbeat report, and while I am always optimistic so you can take this with a grain of salt, read through my posts since the beginning of 2008, and you will see the markedly upward trend of the resale market. Sales so far are incrementally better than the fall, but we keep seeing increasing strong buying trends, and those numbers will start making positive news eventually.
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