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.