Sales Activity Figures Flattening but at a sustainable pace; other national statistics.
Pending Sales: 7463 (+3 from last week)
AWC Contracts: 1472 ( +12 from last week)
Total Contracts: 8935 ( +15 from last week)
Active Listings: 54,102 ( -86 from last week)
Closed Escrows: 1,210 ( -30 from last week)
Closed MTD (5.25.08) 3,841
This week's numbers show that that we may be reaching a short term peak in buying activity. Increased pendings have leveled off, although they are still increasing very slightly. It could just be that its a holiday week, but its hard to say. We are likely to finish over 5,000 home sales in May, if the end of the month rule still holds. Last year through May 25th, we had 4,293 sales, and we finished with 5,774. The last week of April produced something like 1600 sales in a shortened week. We should expect a similar amount, and that would put close to 5,400 homes sold. Not up to last year, but not far off. Certainly it would be a nice increase from April. Listings are also creeping down slightly, and I would love to see it slide into the 53K's by next week. Its probably a reach, but its possible. Still, it is a level we haven't seen for a while, save at the Holiday at the beginning of the year, when many people put off putting homes on the market until January.
I also wanted to mention some other news. I should have commented on this last week when the figures first showed up, but I didn't read it closely. The existing home sales for April were
down nationally by 1%, as noted in this MSNBC report. What the report also notes but doesn't emphasize, and this seems to be the case whenever there is good news, is that homes sales were up 6.6% in the West. Home prices are certainly down, and may continue that way in certain locations, but our April sales figures were up sharply, even without the now infamous foreclosure sales inclusive number published by the AZ Republic a few weeks ago. This month will also be better, and if inventory can continue to slide through the summer, then we may see that prices will have stabilized, and more buyers may take the plunge and purchase.
The second bit I want to mention is the report out today the new homes sales report that came out today. Not that it was a gangbusters breakout, but new home sales for April did increase over March by 3.3%, signifying seasonal gain, but also something more important: there is some confidence in the market again for homes. It may not seem like much, but if things were still going south, you could have still seen a drop in sales as buyers wouldn't think it was a good idea. This is actually the case in the south, or more specifically, Florida, who are heavily weighted in the South region's numbers, who really has a problem. Their numbers didn't go up during this period, so that tells me we have more confidence in our market than they do right now. Our market can probably be described as not so bad; it is not good yet, but it could be much worse. We have a fairly low quantity of new home inventory, we have reached less than 1 year inventory of existing homes, our sales trends are going up, and there seems to be some some confidence re-asserting itself in our market. We still have downside risk in home values, but I can tell you that much of that is going to be weighted to the fringe areas. Again, what I would say is, not so bad. The land market is still soft, as builders are either sellers, or if buying, are only buying distressed lots.
The softer market will continue into the fall, but we may have seen the worst of it already, and we may see some solid strength over the summer. At the current market trends, we are likely to do better than June, July, and August last year, when the sales figures showed 5405, 4684, and 4302, respectively. These are numbers we can reach, and again, our current pending trend seems to show that we will.
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