MLS STATS 5/5/08-5/11/08

Pendings, AWC Contracts UP; Active Listings Slide again.

Week of 5/5/08-5/11/08

Pending Sales: 7373 ( +368 from last week)

AWC Contracts: 1414 ( +82 from last week)

Total Cotnracts: 8787 ( +451 from last week)

Active listings: 54,329 ( -121 from last week)

Closed Escrows (5.5-5.11.08) 914 ( -713 from last week)

MTD Sales (ending 5.11.08) 1,336


First, I would like to say thank you to the couple hundred people who visited after finding my comment on the AZ Republic. I am not used to such an influx of visitors, so it was a little bit flattering to have that kind of traffic. Thank you for your kind emails. I do enjoy hearing from people, so please feel free to do contact me.

Ok, to the business at hand. We have been witnessing an increasingly strong resales recovery. The amount of new activity continues to climb, and the pendings have bounced back very quickly after a blowout sales number at the end of April. (Pendings decrease rapidly at the end of the month, as they close and become "sold".) We have reached a new high in total contracts. We may see 9000 next week. That will be a nice milestone, if we can hit it. The amount of sales went down for the week, but the first week of the month included the last days of April, so end of the month sales spike that figure. 914 is a good solid opening of the month; it will probably be the lowest weekly sales total of this month, with the possible exception of the current one. It is on pace to be a decent month. Active listings have continued to slide ever so slightly, but at least they are sliding. A little known thing occurred at the end of April, and that is that we crossed the One year of inventory line. With almost 5,000 sales in April, and 54,000 listings, if you annualize the sales, you will see that means there is now less than 12 months of inventory. That was not the case prior to April, as sales were too low and inventory too high to make that claim. It is a simple indicator, but I think relevant.

One other thing to be aware of. We are slipping into this 5000 sales a month range, which is helpful, and we may get to 6000 sometime this summer, but I think we all need to temper our enthusiasm and realize that this may be where we are going to be at for a while. Conditions are more difficult in the housing market, as buyers are going to have a more difficult time financing, and many people have no choice but to ask a higher price for their home than the market will bear. There are still only a limited number of homes on the market that are priced low enough for people's blunted enthusiam for buying, and until one of these two factors changes, we will have muted sales figures like this, instead of the 5 figure numbers of 2004-2006. This could be what our medium term potential is. It may get slightly better, but we simply are not going to go back to the velocity we had. I did just check today, and we are significantly ahead of last months pace by the same date. If that holds true to form, I will forecast that we have 5200 to 5400 sales in May. If you would like, leave a comment, and make your own prediction for total MLS sales.

So, we are still improving weekly, and hopefully we can continue to build on it.