STATISTICS SHOW MARKET STEADY
Pending Sales Climb Slightly, AWC too.
Listings falling slightly again.
PENDING SALES: 12,792 ( +140 from last week)
Pending Single Fam: 11,370 ( +134 from last week)
AWC Contracts: 6,130 (+117 from last week)
AWC Single Fam: 5,432 (+102 from last week)
CLOSED (by 8/23) 1,683 ( +19 from last week)
Closed SFam: 1,477 ( -2 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,268 ( -48 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 24,001 ( -77 from last week)
CLOSED MTD : 4,983
Closed SFam 4,390
There is not a lot to be gleaned this week, other than the market continues to perform at a sustainable pace. Listings are falling slightly, but not with real momentum. The number of weekly sales is very consistent with last week. It is a solid number for a middle week as well. There appears to be a slight amount of growth to pending sales, as it has continued to climb in recent weeks, albeit at a fairly modest pace. I don't think we will see a big breakout occurring in pending sales, as the recovery is likely to be a modest one. We are seeing continuing growth in the AWC category, which as we have said is not all for the best. They are contingent sales, no doubt, but 5400 of the 6000+ AWC contracts are short sales. Short sales take several more months to sell, therefore they tend up to pile up in number. Their growth continues to take away from actual sales in that the number of short sales waiting to be approved is now more than 50% of the sales we have each month. If they were to close on a normal basis, we would be seeing at least a 10% increase each month. There were only 1384 short sales in July, a statistic dwarfed by the number visible in AWC. Using our simple realtor math, we can see that it takes about 3.9 months for short sale inventory to go from AWC to Closed. If that buyer had not purchased a short sale, the closing would have happened in probably no more than 60 days, and as we know, almost all would occur within 45 days. Short sales effectively reduce the number of monthly sales, as sales are delayed to subsequent months- several months. These are only the contracts that are visible. As i have pointed out, not all accepted contracts by the seller go into Active with Contingency- some are left as Active in order to attract more buyers. It is difficult to measure this, so that we don't look biased towards optimism of the number of pending contracts, we assume that all short sale contracts are listed as AWC- this is not the case, but better to be wrong short than wrong long, or people accuse you of cooking the numbers to paint a rosy picture.
These numbers, should they stay in this range, are very sustainable. Now, we can expect fall off coming in November through February, as is usual here, but we can also expect a stronger recovery of demand come next March. We may have a better 4th quarter than expected, we don't know for sure. I expect it will be better than last year. We are on a good pace this year, and no matter what any news organization says, we have done well to recover from where we were. We can't have it all better in one night; wounds don't heal, and there is no lucky star to wish upon to make it all better over night. The reality is we are almost at full recovery; it is not perfect, prices have not bounced back to what everyone paid for their homes, but we are fortunate people are buying, and that first time buyers are enthusiastically entering the market, and finding affordable product. There is definitely more good than bad happening right now, and while this depends on the recovery of our economy, housing is doing as well as any of us should be hoping right now. These are real numbers, not projected what-ifs that we hear from so many negative sources.
Here are some other real numbers you never hear about. We will pass the number of total sales in 2008 by Wednesday of this week. We are currently 269 sales short of the 59,237 sales posted in 2008. We are in August, which means we have done that in what will essentially be 7/12 months. We can expect another 4000 or so sales in August, so we will have obliterated the number by 4000 in 2/3's of the time. We are currently ahead of the same point in time last year by 22,580 sales.
Here's another one. There have been 10,028 less listings put on the market this year than there was by the same point last year. This is the fact this year, despite the foreclosure crush the media talks about.
If you are still feeling negative about where the housing market is headed, here are a few other items that I rarely mention because the concept is a little broad for short term analysis. These are numbers pulled straight from MLS, so if you disagree with me about a recovery in the housing market, consider these numbers as well.
-The median new list price has been climbing for three straight months, and generally climbing for six months.
-The dollar volume of sold listings has exceeded the same months last year 3 out of the past 4 months, will probably be 4 of the last 5 by the end of August.
-The number of new listings each month this year is less than last year every month this year except for March.
-The number of sales has exceeded every month last year by a minimum of 54.9%.
Things as I see them are heading in the right direction, and there are no guarantees that we won't see some bumps, it is just about time for some optimism about the market to take hold. Ultimately, without optimism by consumers, the market will not recover. This 24 news cycle has a tendency to always find the negative no matter how positive the numbers coming out are, and they just continually feed the pessimism. As I wrote that last sentence, I thought "I better back this statement up." So, I decided to look for a news article that supported what I said. I didn't have to go far. It was a headline. Here is a perfect example of reporting good news, but spinning it negative. The article quotes the most bearish of housing analysts, Robert Shiller of the Case-Shiller index, just falling over himself about this massive increase in price, but they are already begging the question of why haven't we won the next victory, even though that battle has yet to be fought. I do get frustrated by the way news is reported, and I have sworn off watching about 90% of the financial news that I used to watch, only really tuning in to Fox Business Channel occasionally, for mostly the scenery.
You can only take so much of this being dragged one way by the hard news, and then being dragged the other way by their manipulation of your fears in order to get you to tune in again for the next death-defying, cliff-hanging, economy collapsing statistic that is going to show up and spell either doom for us, or allow us to sleep safely in our beds-for this night at least. Their methods remind of watching the old NWA wrestling when I was a kid. They never left a show without a bad guy entering stage left, pounding the hero with a chair or something, starting a melee as the camera cut out and the show ended. As kids we just died waiting for next week's show to find out what happened when the cameras wer off. The modern media has taken this to a global scale, and we all sit around waiting for them to tell us what is happening that we can't see. The financial channels, when they were there mostly to sell us on investing in wall street, basically operating the same as trackside television does for horse racing, encouraging betting, we at least knew what their purpose was. Now, it is either at least more insidious, and certainly more subtle, as their own real quest is for ratings has them tapping in to the global soap opera of Life On This Planet, and using the flow of really useless information to most of us, to put us in that same mindframe as the kids on the couch watching saturday night wrestling: don't miss the next show, because its going to be big, Big BIG!!
Don't buy into the minute by minute ups and downs. We are all interested where things are going, but news is no longer just about reporting news, its about them needing to hook more people, and a few thousand people to financial channels is more significant than we realize. Watch the larger trends, watch out for the "yeah, buts" reports. We are likely to see a lot of them. Sorry about the rant, but I have been getting so frustrated with the positive reports followed up by the "could happens". Have a great week.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
ARMLS STATS 8/10-8/16/09
Brett Farve Signs with the Vikings!
Pendings Up, Sales Up, Overall Listings Slide
AWC continue to grow; not necessarily a positive.
Pending Sales: 12,652 ( +284 from last week)
Pending SFam: 11,236 ( +231 from last week)
AWC: 6,013 ( +186 from last week)
AWC SFAM: 5,330 ( +152 from last week)
Closed: 1,664 ( +252 from last week)
Closed SFam: 1,479 ( +236 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,316 ( -230 from last week)
Active SFam: 24,078 ( +14 from last week)
CLOSED MTD: 3,257
Closed SFam: 2,879
Statistics for the week don't tell us a lot; the closings continue to show strength, putting us on track for 8000+ closings in the month in all likelihood. Overall listings fell again, but single family stayed stable. Either condos are starting to sell, or there are a few more foreclosures making an appearance. I will let a few more weeks go by before I do a detailed analysis of this. The national new housing sales is actually positive, with overall starts down, but single family starts were actually higher. This being reported as negative news is baffling certainly apartment construction contributes to economic activity, but reporting it in the context that housing starts are down, because apartment construction is down, is deceiving. Beazer, Fulton, DR Horton, and Toll Brothers could care less if apartment construction dropped to zer0; in fact they might like it, as it denotes how consumers view economic conditions. If they feel good about the long term, they will buy homes, if they are unsure, there is more demand for rental properties. I have always been baffled by the combination of these two statistics.
The statistics show we are still in recovery, albeit with one that there are still significant numbers of foreclosures out there. We still see the AWC category reaching new records each week, due to short sale contracts piling up. At some point, these short sales must start closing. Only 535 of the closings this month are short sales so far. These are starting to jam up the system, and the banks need to do a better job of clearing these.
Most importantly this week, and quite honestly the reason I won't be doing a lot of in-depth analysis, is that Brett Favre signed with the Vikings, and I am just too excited about the season to do much analysis today. So between that, and the mid- month point we are at, this is going to be an abbreviated post. It looks like we are still doing well, and will probably continue to do well into September. The Vikings will start doing well in September. Go Vikes!
chris
Pendings Up, Sales Up, Overall Listings Slide
AWC continue to grow; not necessarily a positive.
Pending Sales: 12,652 ( +284 from last week)
Pending SFam: 11,236 ( +231 from last week)
AWC: 6,013 ( +186 from last week)
AWC SFAM: 5,330 ( +152 from last week)
Closed: 1,664 ( +252 from last week)
Closed SFam: 1,479 ( +236 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,316 ( -230 from last week)
Active SFam: 24,078 ( +14 from last week)
CLOSED MTD: 3,257
Closed SFam: 2,879
Statistics for the week don't tell us a lot; the closings continue to show strength, putting us on track for 8000+ closings in the month in all likelihood. Overall listings fell again, but single family stayed stable. Either condos are starting to sell, or there are a few more foreclosures making an appearance. I will let a few more weeks go by before I do a detailed analysis of this. The national new housing sales is actually positive, with overall starts down, but single family starts were actually higher. This being reported as negative news is baffling certainly apartment construction contributes to economic activity, but reporting it in the context that housing starts are down, because apartment construction is down, is deceiving. Beazer, Fulton, DR Horton, and Toll Brothers could care less if apartment construction dropped to zer0; in fact they might like it, as it denotes how consumers view economic conditions. If they feel good about the long term, they will buy homes, if they are unsure, there is more demand for rental properties. I have always been baffled by the combination of these two statistics.
The statistics show we are still in recovery, albeit with one that there are still significant numbers of foreclosures out there. We still see the AWC category reaching new records each week, due to short sale contracts piling up. At some point, these short sales must start closing. Only 535 of the closings this month are short sales so far. These are starting to jam up the system, and the banks need to do a better job of clearing these.
Most importantly this week, and quite honestly the reason I won't be doing a lot of in-depth analysis, is that Brett Favre signed with the Vikings, and I am just too excited about the season to do much analysis today. So between that, and the mid- month point we are at, this is going to be an abbreviated post. It looks like we are still doing well, and will probably continue to do well into September. The Vikings will start doing well in September. Go Vikes!
chris
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
MLS STATS 8/3-8/09-2009
LISTINGS RISE FOR FIRST TIME IN MONTHS
PENDINGS UP SHARPLY, AWC UP AGAIN
Rise in inventory attributable to Lender -owned listings...
PENDING SALES: 12,368 ( +340 from last week)
Pending Sing. Fam: 11,005 ( +278 from last week)
AWC: 5,827 ( +126 from last week)
AWC Sing. Fam: 5,178 ( +102 from last week)
Closed Escrows: 1,412 ( -1362 from last week)
Closed Single Fam: 1,243 ( -1194 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,546 (+215 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 24,064 (+221 from last week)
Closed MTD (8-9-09): 1526
Closed MTD SFam: 1,342
The big news of the week is that active listing rose for the first time in quite a while. The reason for this was a sharp weekly increase in single family listings. There were 753 new single family listings compared to the week before. Its highly likely that some lender pushed out a whole raft of inventory all at once to contribute to this rise. The other categories- condos, mobiles, townhomes, etc, were actually down slightly. Compared to the previous week, there were 100 more active listings put on the market in Phoenix, 42 more homes in Scottsdale, 29 more in Maricopa, 10 more in Mesa, and 9 more in Surprise.
There is no real discernable geographic pattern where the increase in listings is coming from. New weekly listings are broadly spread, as you can see, and would expect. The bulk of the listings, 1277 out of 1989 single family listings, occurred in the price range of 100K-500K. Only 633 of the 1989 were listed as lender-owned, however, which I found surprising. 535 were short sale properties. That number is not particularly high, as the previous weeks short sale listings were 466-this is not the source of the increase. Lender owned does explain a bit more of the increase- there were 431 lender owned listings the previous week, an increase of 202. That does explain the inventory. We may see more of that from lenders as a whole, but as I understand it, one lender in town is pulling all of their listings off the market in the next couple of weeks, as they take the process in house, apparently. Or they may choose to pull these homes off the market, temporarily, as prices seem to have bottomed out somewhat, and they may be able to get considerably more in the next several months. If their financial position has stabilized somewhat, they may feel it is worth the wait to do so. It will be interesting to see if this was an aberration, or if we have more increases in lender owned properties.
We also saw pending sales rise fairly sharply, which is a good sign that we will have continuing demand, at least through August and September. The AWC figure keeps rising, and out of that 5,178 single family AWC contracts, 4568 are noted as short sales. That seems high, but out of 24000 single family listings, over 25% of them are short sale listings. So, many of the homes under contract would be short sales, as they often are the homes had at the best prices and condition. Lender sales are often in worse shape than short sales, as the short saler has a motivation for upkeep. There is a growing distaste for this process, and th federal government has said they are going to prompt greater short sale success with the lenders, so perhaps this process will start going quicker. It should be noted as well that many short sales are NOT changed to AWC, as many sellers will keep these homes as active as it is desirable to try and find someone who will pay a better price, which can easily happen over the course of the months it takes to get a short sale through.
Interestingly, there were 230 short sales completed last week, and while the distribution of homes on the map usually follow the pattern of density of the metro area- meaning that Phoenix gets a high distribution of listings, sales, etc, on the map, short sales in Phoenix seem to be tougher to accomplish. Look at this map of the short sales from last week:
Very few short sales occurred in Phoenix. That could be an aberration, of course, but it seems like our subarbanites are more likely to ask banks to take a hit on the loan. Its more of a social experiment than valid real estate news, but it would be interesting to see if the incidence of lender foreclosures is higher in the core city or the suburbs.
In other items that are pointing to a more positive 4th quarter, consumer confidence was up. Consumers are just starting to shake off the cobwebs, some buying new cars, others are investing in homes. We also saw productivity rise sharply, which will show up in profitability in later quarters. Of course, this is usually at the expense of bloated payrolls, which have been slashed by companies big and small.
The gorilla out of its cage this week is the increase in single family lender-owned properties. We knew it was coming eventually, but we don't want it to be a trend. I would say that it is a fairly timid increase, as we have been told various times about the 5000-10000 in a month scenario. This looks like a little spike, and quite honestly is looking more and more that this is the result of so many homes going the short sale route that could take 90-120 days to complete, which is 3-4 times as long as a normal escrow. A thought I would leave you with is that if we have such a short sale loaded AWC category, how many potential short sales are there still sitting in the Active category? I myself have 4 short sale deals I am working on, and only one of them has been changed to AWC, the rest the agents have left as active. That is in land, people, not houses, so you can imagine how many "invisible" residential contracts are out there right now. Hopefully, that process begins to speed up, as it is beginning to clog the system.
PENDINGS UP SHARPLY, AWC UP AGAIN
Rise in inventory attributable to Lender -owned listings...
PENDING SALES: 12,368 ( +340 from last week)
Pending Sing. Fam: 11,005 ( +278 from last week)
AWC: 5,827 ( +126 from last week)
AWC Sing. Fam: 5,178 ( +102 from last week)
Closed Escrows: 1,412 ( -1362 from last week)
Closed Single Fam: 1,243 ( -1194 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,546 (+215 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 24,064 (+221 from last week)
Closed MTD (8-9-09): 1526
Closed MTD SFam: 1,342
The big news of the week is that active listing rose for the first time in quite a while. The reason for this was a sharp weekly increase in single family listings. There were 753 new single family listings compared to the week before. Its highly likely that some lender pushed out a whole raft of inventory all at once to contribute to this rise. The other categories- condos, mobiles, townhomes, etc, were actually down slightly. Compared to the previous week, there were 100 more active listings put on the market in Phoenix, 42 more homes in Scottsdale, 29 more in Maricopa, 10 more in Mesa, and 9 more in Surprise.
There is no real discernable geographic pattern where the increase in listings is coming from. New weekly listings are broadly spread, as you can see, and would expect. The bulk of the listings, 1277 out of 1989 single family listings, occurred in the price range of 100K-500K. Only 633 of the 1989 were listed as lender-owned, however, which I found surprising. 535 were short sale properties. That number is not particularly high, as the previous weeks short sale listings were 466-this is not the source of the increase. Lender owned does explain a bit more of the increase- there were 431 lender owned listings the previous week, an increase of 202. That does explain the inventory. We may see more of that from lenders as a whole, but as I understand it, one lender in town is pulling all of their listings off the market in the next couple of weeks, as they take the process in house, apparently. Or they may choose to pull these homes off the market, temporarily, as prices seem to have bottomed out somewhat, and they may be able to get considerably more in the next several months. If their financial position has stabilized somewhat, they may feel it is worth the wait to do so. It will be interesting to see if this was an aberration, or if we have more increases in lender owned properties.We also saw pending sales rise fairly sharply, which is a good sign that we will have continuing demand, at least through August and September. The AWC figure keeps rising, and out of that 5,178 single family AWC contracts, 4568 are noted as short sales. That seems high, but out of 24000 single family listings, over 25% of them are short sale listings. So, many of the homes under contract would be short sales, as they often are the homes had at the best prices and condition. Lender sales are often in worse shape than short sales, as the short saler has a motivation for upkeep. There is a growing distaste for this process, and th federal government has said they are going to prompt greater short sale success with the lenders, so perhaps this process will start going quicker. It should be noted as well that many short sales are NOT changed to AWC, as many sellers will keep these homes as active as it is desirable to try and find someone who will pay a better price, which can easily happen over the course of the months it takes to get a short sale through.
Interestingly, there were 230 short sales completed last week, and while the distribution of homes on the map usually follow the pattern of density of the metro area- meaning that Phoenix gets a high distribution of listings, sales, etc, on the map, short sales in Phoenix seem to be tougher to accomplish. Look at this map of the short sales from last week:
Very few short sales occurred in Phoenix. That could be an aberration, of course, but it seems like our subarbanites are more likely to ask banks to take a hit on the loan. Its more of a social experiment than valid real estate news, but it would be interesting to see if the incidence of lender foreclosures is higher in the core city or the suburbs.In other items that are pointing to a more positive 4th quarter, consumer confidence was up. Consumers are just starting to shake off the cobwebs, some buying new cars, others are investing in homes. We also saw productivity rise sharply, which will show up in profitability in later quarters. Of course, this is usually at the expense of bloated payrolls, which have been slashed by companies big and small.
The gorilla out of its cage this week is the increase in single family lender-owned properties. We knew it was coming eventually, but we don't want it to be a trend. I would say that it is a fairly timid increase, as we have been told various times about the 5000-10000 in a month scenario. This looks like a little spike, and quite honestly is looking more and more that this is the result of so many homes going the short sale route that could take 90-120 days to complete, which is 3-4 times as long as a normal escrow. A thought I would leave you with is that if we have such a short sale loaded AWC category, how many potential short sales are there still sitting in the Active category? I myself have 4 short sale deals I am working on, and only one of them has been changed to AWC, the rest the agents have left as active. That is in land, people, not houses, so you can imagine how many "invisible" residential contracts are out there right now. Hopefully, that process begins to speed up, as it is beginning to clog the system.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
MLS STATS 7/27-8/2/09/09
**JULY SALES TOP 9000**
Active Listings Drop again.
National Housing News turns positive.
PENDING SALES: 12,028 ( -814 from last week)
Pending Sing. Fam: 10,727 ( -704 from last week)
AWC: 5,701 ( +11 from last week)
AWC Sing. Fam: 5,076 ( +19 from last week)
Closed Escrows: 2,774 ( +921 from last week)
Closed Single Fam: 2,437 ( +790 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,331 ( -364 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 24,043 ( -307 from last week)
CLOSED IN JULY: 9,096
Closed Single Fam: 7,987
July finished up with just enough kick to top 9000 sales for the month; this figure is less than June's Sales of approx 9300, but then it always is. Still, July was a very good month for inventory reduction and sales increases, as inventory has continued to fall, although at a slower pace than it had. Inventory is not going to fall to zero, so we are starting to reach the bottom of inventory's elasticity, especially given the current economic realities. We are doing very well considering the challenges. We are now at 3.01 months of single family inventory, and and about 3.4 months overall. This is a very sustainable level; it is probably the appropriate level that will cause home prices to bounce back to what I would refer to as natural levels. Median prices remained relatively stable from June to July, with the admittedly small sample size of August showing a slight uptick already. The direction of prices is going to go up, of that we can be sure. The prices are currently deflated, but this condition will not last forever as psychology improves with the positive news coming from seemingly every corner of the housing industry. What I can point out price wise is that dollar volume for single family sales outstripped June's total by $7,500,000. This might seem insignificant, except that were more than 250 more homes sold in June than July, and this translates to about an average $12,000 per home increase in price. This is not the median, but the average. This shows that prices are getting better, even as the median continues to be held down by the sheer number of low end homes being sold. There are even seems to be a little more movement in the million dollar market, as 91 homes sold in July at $1,000,000 plus. This is about a 1/3 increase over just a few months ago.
Regarding current inventory, I suspect we may see a little spike coming up as it seems lenders have been holding back foreclosures to take advantage of a new state law that is supposed to go in effect in September that would allow them to pursue the owners for a deficiency judgment. This law was written poorly in the middle of the stream, and a pretty big outcry has forced even its sponsor (Pierce, Prescott, AZ) to recant it, and it is likely going to be repealed. Its possible the lenders were waiting on this law to go into effect, so there might be a spurt of new actives coming on line if they decide to accelerate the foreclosure process, as there would be no advantage to them to hold off any longer. I am not positive of this effect, but it seems reasonable that there will be some spike in inventory. Of course, demand may dispose of that quickly, as it has been doing with foreclosures all year, but we don't know how big a wave it will be, nor do we know how well demand will hold up.
I don't normally like to give a reading list of news articles, but working this many into a coherent paragraph would require more time than I have today. So here are several articles from around the web that are starting to change the psychology around the housing market. They are wide-ranging and realistic, and I think they can start to be believed as more than cheerleading for the industry. Especially the Case-Schiller data- they are like listening to the resigned-to-a-nuclear-war BBC announcer in the sixties with the doomsday clock ticking in the background normally- pessimism and destruction on its way, all the time. If they are acknowledging better numbers, we have likely bumped bottom. Here is the list, should you care to follow the articles:
Pending Home Sales Rise: CNBC
Case Schiller Reports Reversing: Realty Times
Local: Builders report positive signs: AZ Republic
Foreclosures Stabilize in Arizona: AZ Republic
Builders find success with smaller homes: KTAR
Signs of Hope in California Housing: CNBC
Now, you may not want to read all of these, but the point really is that there seems to be some really good news out there developing in the housing industry, and it is about time. The news is there, which is critical to turning around the psychology of malaise that the industry has suffered through for the last several years. We are hoping for a strong month of August, and we will need to see if pendings pop back up after their sharp end of the month drawdown in July.
It was a very good month of July, and a very good week, as the positive news seems to be tumbling out all over. Hopefully it will continue.
chris
Active Listings Drop again.
National Housing News turns positive.
PENDING SALES: 12,028 ( -814 from last week)
Pending Sing. Fam: 10,727 ( -704 from last week)
AWC: 5,701 ( +11 from last week)
AWC Sing. Fam: 5,076 ( +19 from last week)
Closed Escrows: 2,774 ( +921 from last week)
Closed Single Fam: 2,437 ( +790 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,331 ( -364 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 24,043 ( -307 from last week)
CLOSED IN JULY: 9,096
Closed Single Fam: 7,987
July finished up with just enough kick to top 9000 sales for the month; this figure is less than June's Sales of approx 9300, but then it always is. Still, July was a very good month for inventory reduction and sales increases, as inventory has continued to fall, although at a slower pace than it had. Inventory is not going to fall to zero, so we are starting to reach the bottom of inventory's elasticity, especially given the current economic realities. We are doing very well considering the challenges. We are now at 3.01 months of single family inventory, and and about 3.4 months overall. This is a very sustainable level; it is probably the appropriate level that will cause home prices to bounce back to what I would refer to as natural levels. Median prices remained relatively stable from June to July, with the admittedly small sample size of August showing a slight uptick already. The direction of prices is going to go up, of that we can be sure. The prices are currently deflated, but this condition will not last forever as psychology improves with the positive news coming from seemingly every corner of the housing industry. What I can point out price wise is that dollar volume for single family sales outstripped June's total by $7,500,000. This might seem insignificant, except that were more than 250 more homes sold in June than July, and this translates to about an average $12,000 per home increase in price. This is not the median, but the average. This shows that prices are getting better, even as the median continues to be held down by the sheer number of low end homes being sold. There are even seems to be a little more movement in the million dollar market, as 91 homes sold in July at $1,000,000 plus. This is about a 1/3 increase over just a few months ago.
Regarding current inventory, I suspect we may see a little spike coming up as it seems lenders have been holding back foreclosures to take advantage of a new state law that is supposed to go in effect in September that would allow them to pursue the owners for a deficiency judgment. This law was written poorly in the middle of the stream, and a pretty big outcry has forced even its sponsor (Pierce, Prescott, AZ) to recant it, and it is likely going to be repealed. Its possible the lenders were waiting on this law to go into effect, so there might be a spurt of new actives coming on line if they decide to accelerate the foreclosure process, as there would be no advantage to them to hold off any longer. I am not positive of this effect, but it seems reasonable that there will be some spike in inventory. Of course, demand may dispose of that quickly, as it has been doing with foreclosures all year, but we don't know how big a wave it will be, nor do we know how well demand will hold up.
I don't normally like to give a reading list of news articles, but working this many into a coherent paragraph would require more time than I have today. So here are several articles from around the web that are starting to change the psychology around the housing market. They are wide-ranging and realistic, and I think they can start to be believed as more than cheerleading for the industry. Especially the Case-Schiller data- they are like listening to the resigned-to-a-nuclear-war BBC announcer in the sixties with the doomsday clock ticking in the background normally- pessimism and destruction on its way, all the time. If they are acknowledging better numbers, we have likely bumped bottom. Here is the list, should you care to follow the articles:
Pending Home Sales Rise: CNBC
Case Schiller Reports Reversing: Realty Times
Local: Builders report positive signs: AZ Republic
Foreclosures Stabilize in Arizona: AZ Republic
Builders find success with smaller homes: KTAR
Signs of Hope in California Housing: CNBC
Now, you may not want to read all of these, but the point really is that there seems to be some really good news out there developing in the housing industry, and it is about time. The news is there, which is critical to turning around the psychology of malaise that the industry has suffered through for the last several years. We are hoping for a strong month of August, and we will need to see if pendings pop back up after their sharp end of the month drawdown in July.
It was a very good month of July, and a very good week, as the positive news seems to be tumbling out all over. Hopefully it will continue.
chris
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