December finishes up strong, Annual Sales best 2007 handily.
Sales figures for December top 5600!
Sorry I forgot to tell you that I would not be posting last week either; I was unavailable and therefore missed the huge jump in sales that occurred at the end of December. There was apparently quite a finish, as the final weeks pushed us in to some welcome territory for sales. Here are the stats for the end of the year:
December 08: 5,628 Resales, 5,047 of these were single family homes.
For comparison, December 07 finished with only 3,340 sales total, single family homes were 2765! Even November of this year only showed 4449 closings. That shows we are moving ahead, even if prices have fallen.
Resales for the year on MLS totaled 59,772 total and 52,555 single family residences. Not great, but a 10.2% and 19.6% improvement respectively, over 2007's total of 54,238 and 43,921. Note the relatively higher improvement of single family sales- a very good sign, to say the least. If that is the trend, we may be out of this mess sooner than we realize.
A sale through MLS, as I have often said, is usually one in which someone wants the house. This would be a very encouraging sign, but let's look at current stats. On to new business!
PENDING SALES: 5,694 (-725 from 12/16, but up 2350 from Jan 6, 08!)
Pend. SF SALES: 5,167 ( -629 from 12/16, No Jan. 08 Single Fam. Stats Avail.)
AWC Total: 908 ( -88 from Dec 16, 2008 +392 from January '08)
AWC Single Fam. 836 ( -75 from Dec 16, 2008)
Closed 12/29-Jan 4 1,367 ( + 424 from 12/16/08)
Closed Sing. Fam " " 1,213 ( + 353 from 12/16/08)
Active Listings: 52,026 (-2,461 from 12/16/08) 1st Week 2008 was 53,266
Active Single Fam. 42,827 (-2,117 from 12/16/08)
(Note the new format, it just saves me time jumping back and forth when pulling statistics from MLS. We will try it this way for a while.)
These numbers show a mixed picture. Certainly, January sales are not likely to be as good as December's given the fall in pending sales. However, they are way up from last January, (check the archive of my blog for historical stats) so expect the sales to be better than last January. There was a steep drop in listings, as usually expected, in December, which actually brought us below the inventory level at the same time frame last year. It is a shallow improvement, but a helpful improvement nonetheless given that we can probably expect a far more dynamic demand for homes coming by the end of first quarter, and have a chance to chew up some inventory. I do expect the inventory to rise a bit over the next six weeks, but, I also expect pendings and AWC contracts to start growing rapidly as well. Eventually, we are going to reach the tipping point where the number of listings entering the market slows down, and the increased buying activity starts eating up inventory. It could happen as early as March, but I am not ready to call that yet. We did see AWC contracts start to spike up as early as middle January last year, so we can watch carefully for that the next few weeks. Its interesting to go back and visit the archive and see what was happening at the same time a year ago. I remember being excited about the headlines saying AWC had reached 600 in one week, then 700 the next, as it looked like a rally-which it was. March and April were good months, and I would expect that they will be better this year.
If January and February sales can stay above 4,000, which I have every reason to believe they will, I think we can see March hitting 6000, and April maybe hitting 7000, depending on the national economy by that point. I am going to make an early prediction that we will hit 70,000 resales easily in 2009.
Mortgage rates have fallen to ridiculously low levels, as have home prices, and gas prices. Despite the economy, I expect there to be a housing rally as Americans get comfortable with the new realities. Mortgage applications have been climbing at a steady clip with the rates under 5%, and that will start hitting the sales charts eventually. I expect a good second quarter rally. First quarter will be better than last year as well, but I think a breakout may come in April.
No comments:
Post a Comment