JULY SALES IN, INVENTORY SLOW TO FALL

July Sales TOP June-Blows away last July!

These are numbers extracted from the NEW MLS system, which I am not 100% sure of its accuracy yet, but the numbers I am seeing are not inherently unbelievable. The pendings are low, but we did have a big last week of July. I am not sure that all agents have quite figured out the system yet, and that can delay entry into the system of certain statistics. I do think they are pretty much in line with where they should be. The Active with Contingency stat is not working on the new system. They have three different categories of "AWC", but all three total 267, so either agents don't know how to enter it yet, or it just does not function the same way as the old system, and we won't be using it. Either way, the 267 is not accurate, so I am not putting it in.


Pending Sales: 6,618 ( -692 from last week)

Active With Contingency: N/A ( Last Week, 1,407)

Closed 7.28.08-8.3.08: 2,023 ( +846 from last week)

Closed Month to Date: 293

Active Listings: 52,571* ( -283 from last week)

SINGLE FAMILY STATS

Single Family Closed: 1,806 ( +786 from last week)

Single Family MTD: 268

Active Listings: 43,067 ( -244 from last week)


JULY STATS

JULY CLOSED ESCROWS: 6,033 June 08 ( 5,763)
July 07 ( 4683)

Single Family Homes: 5,355 June 08 (5065)
July 07 (3834)

Using the current month stats: there is a 8.04 month supply of SFD.

There was a very good end of July that I didn't really see coming. The numbers really blew past projections, if they are accurate. I don't have any reason to doubt them, other than we haven't seen 6,000 closings in a month in a while, and that we have a new stats system. Great to see month over month performance increases. I don't think August will top July however, but this is a very good month worth noting.

As you can see, the numbers show we are obviously in much better shape than we were last july, when we were simply getting battered by the credit crunch and the falling expectations of the market. The fact that we did better than June of 08 is what really impressed me.

What I also like is that such a large proportion of these sales are single family homes. As most of you agents who read this are concerned with that, that is a very good sign for you.

*I will express doubt in other statistics on here, and that is for active listings. I have a feeling that the number, compared to the system we used to use, might be lower, as the AWC statististics must be showing up in active somewhere. That would inflate the number of active listings, and they really should have fallen a lot more given our big week. If 10 day old+ contracts are not being broken out from active by agents because they can't, or because the system doesn't account for them, then this would explain why we didn't drop into the 51K listings this month. I am not sure of this, but it doesn't really seem possible that we sold as many homes as we did in the last week, and only dropped a few hundred homes from inventory. Other months in which this happened, with less closings, I might add, we dropped 1000+ listings. I can't point out directly where this discrepancy is, so we will have to watch.

Overall, a surprisingly good week, and a very positive start pointing to a recovery in our housing market. We have had four such months of improving numbers, and while I think this might be the best month we have this year, we can have some very real optimism that the market is a lot healthier in the latter half of 2008 than it was at the same time last year. I don't know how this will affect prices yet; economics would say prices may continue to fall, and I think that the price pressure is surely downward or sideways as opposed to upward, but I think that the rate of fall is slowing to a stop at the very least, as sales increase. There are still probably 10,000 too many listings on the market right now, and the foreclosure sales that don't show up here siphon off demand from investors, so we still have a ways to go to a equalized market. I am optimistic this week, however, that we are going in the right direction.