June Sales Surpass June '07!
June Sales Surpass May '08!
Preliminary Figures show 5,732 gross MLS Closings!
Weekly MLS Stats 6-23 though-6-29
Sorry, I got a little late start today, but the good news is that we had a great week, and while Monday the 30th are not included in the weekly sales, we have safely surpassed the critical figure of June 07, marking the first year over year improvement. That is a benchmark, and I am very happy about that. I will dive into the single family home sales component as well, but first, lets get the weekly numbers out of the way:
Pending Sales: 6913 ( -693 from last week)
Active with Contingency: 1,463 ( -85 from last week)
Active Listings: 52,382 ( -603 from last week)
Closed Escrows 6-23 to 6-29 1,494 ( +322 from last week)
Closed Month to Date (6/29) 4,965
Closed Month of June (preliminary) 5733 ( +328 from June '07)
( +101 from May '08)
Single Family Homes Sold in June: 5,069 +198 from May'08
Single Family Listings 7/1/08 42,907
Single Family Supply: 8.46 months
Okay, where to start...June was a very good month given our last year. Psychologically, it is important that we finally did get a monthly increase year over year, as it hasn't happend for probably three years. (April was supposedly, but as you may recall there was the fiasco including the foreclosure sales and bank repos) These are legitimate MLS sales, and as such, I mark this as an important step to the recovery. It is also worth noting that we eclipsed May's sales figures as well, so we get a two for one on the improvement front. June is a fair month, but May has run better in the past, except for the boom years, which were more attributable to a rising market event than normalcy, so it is a sign of relative strength. Single family home sales in June were also better than May's which is another great sign.
This is a very nice development, as due to the number of pendings and active with contingencies still on the books, it looks like we are probably going to pace ahead of the next few months in sales as well, giving us a very nice improvement over last year. I won't speak to more than a quarter out, as the economy is fragile, or at least the news leads us to believe that, and we could have a slowdown in the next few months. But its foreseeable that July will be a good month, and August as well, given the number of contracts already in play.
Not everything was rosy, however. We still see that the number of active listings, while they did slide, did not slide as far as hoped. That means there were a fair amount of listings that came on the market. While we still bit into the listings, we really only cleared about 500 off for a month, it appears. That number is funny, because it doesn't appear to track well with the closed sales or pendings exactly, and so I don't know how they calculate it. The new system will be different I suppose, so I am not going to spend a lot of time worrying about it.
So far the bad news, that was just about it. We haven't reached the sales levels of 2003 yet, but we are doing a heck of a lot better.
I will be putting up a chart of the activity at some point this week. I wanted to include June into the chart, which I can do now. We have reached the halfway point of the year, and we are continuing to do better, although we have a little ways to go to be in a strong market again. A 25% increase in sales would be an excellent long term monthly sales number, but I think we are a ways from achieving that yet. The status of the Housing rescue plan will have a lot to do with that. There is a $8000 first time homebuyer tax credit included in that bill, which has not yet passed, that will encourage some purchasing next year. I don't have all the details on that yet, but it would be a step in the right direction to get people motivated again. In the meantime, we do have some definite signs of strength in our market, even if the national market is not doing better yet.
Chris Just
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