AUG. PRELIM CLOSINGS: 7979- a little light.
Single Family Listings Fall into 23K's!
AWC contracts slide slightly-short sales beginning to Close?
**September 1st is the two-year anniversary of this blog. **
PENDING SALES: 12,191 ( -601 from last week)
Pending S.Fam: 10,874 ( -496 from last week)
AWC: 6,084 ( -46 from last week)
AWC Single Fam: 5,385 (-47 from last week)
CLOSED: 2,076 ( +393 from last week)
Closed Single Fam: 1,806 ( +329 from last week)
Active Listings: 31,011 ( -257 from last week)
Active Single Fam: 23,825 ( -176 from last week)
August CLOSED: 7,979
August Closed SFam: 7,010
Sales for August turned up a bit light, as expectations were they would cross 8,000. It still is likely to happen, as realtors sometimes lag in putting their closings in to the system. I usually wait a few days before putting this figure up, but it did close out yesterday, so this is fairly accurate within several dozen closings in the MLS for August.
Pending sales also fell at the end of the month as per usual, but the number is still pretty strong. We will see it grow again going into September, but we will start to see the predictive numbers tail off, as October and November are not expected to be blowout months. Perhaps because of the $8000 credit, we will see some stronger activity after September, but don't bank on it.
Interestingly, AWC contracts fell for the first time, I think, in quite a long time, as sales either are decreasing, or short sales are finally starting to exit the system. There were 159 more short sales in August than July, which means that given August had a smaller sales figure, they do make up an even larger proportion of sales in August than July. Its enough to account for the number, but the number of short sales categorized as AWC did fall slightly from last week, so that does support that short sales may finally start closing, instead of clogging up AWC in the MLS system.
Encouragingly, Active listings fell at the end of August, relatively sharply too. We have finally fallen into the $23K's in Single Family Listings. We have also reached a reduced number of closings, compared to June, so its not all great, but we need to see listings fall as low as possible prior to the fall slowdown. We are likely to see some foreclosures added back to the market in October and November, when sales won't be able to keep up with new foreclosure listings.
Both single family and sales overall average median prices stayed the same- $130K, and $125K, respectively. We are still seeing the pricing effect of bank and short sales making up such a large portion of available inventory. Prices are kept relatively low, as people see these as less valuable properties. There is also a steady supply of them. September is usually a month in which a lot of listings come on the market as well, so we will be watching for that.
We did have 1,580 less listings in August than we did last year, and we did surpass August 2008 in dollar volume of sales, even with the drastically reduced prices year over year. These are minor statistics, but they do point to stability in the current market.
On the media front, nationl pending sales figures made news today. So much of our industry is psychological, and thse are the kind of stories that are crucial to the turnaround. First, it does prove that housing is getting better, but its arguably as important for the consumer to see that its safe to poke his head above ground again- or more accurately, dig up the bankroll he buried in the backyard. The cash for clunkers program was a tremendous benefit to the overall psychology of consumers, at a measly price of 3 billion dollars. We as a nation are sheeple, and we tend to follow the crowd. "If others are buying, I should be too." That is how it works.
The other positive bit of news, besides GM's blowout car sales report, is that the labor market may be bottoming. Let's hope that is true.
Kind of a mixed bag this week. I would have hoped we would blow past 8000 sales in August, but we likely just reached it. But we did have inventory levels falling again, and we reached a new multiyear low in Single Family listings. We also might be starting to see banks dispose of short sales a little quicker, which would be a tremendous benefit to all of us.
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