ARMLS STATS 10/12-18/09

Pendings Top 13K, Actives up slightly.
AWC still higher as short sales climb.
October should top September's Sales

PENDING SALES: 13,100 ( +134 from last week)
Pending Sfam: 11,495 ( +140 from last week)

AWC: 6,626 ( +14 from last week)
AWC SFam: 5,871 ( +11 from last week)

Closed (10/18): 1,636 ( +309 from last week)
Closed Sfam: 1,428 ( +279 from last week)

Active: 31,887 ( +147 from last week)
Active Sfam: 24,542 ( +70 from last week)

Closed MTD (10/18): 3,636
Closed MTD Sfam: 3,154

The number of active listings rose slightly, as we have reached that time in the early fall before the holiday season that home listings tend to increase, and sales start to slow down. It was not a sharp increase, but it did go up statistically. I will discuss more about this next week. We are not being buried by new foreclosure listings, so I will leave it there for now.

Interestingly, pendings continue to rise, now topping 13,000 again. Solid pending numbers usually lead to solid sales numbers, so we can anticipate that October will be okay. We are running slightly ahead of September's pace, but not significantly so. Enough to put us over the 8000 mark, which will not be bad for October. Still, it is likely that activity will decrease somewhat as we head into the dormant season. I expect active listings to rise a bit during the fall, as there are foreclosures out there, and they will be put on the market by the banks.

We are of course still buried in short sale contracts. They are taking far too long to close, and that is affecting what should look like an even stronger recovery in home resales.

There has been in some interesting development in other areas that I will have to address another time; I don't have the time today to do so. One of those articles is that London, England, who had virtually the same problem we had with their housing market before we did, is now suffering a housing shortage. Bloomberg has the article here. Their market is not our market, but it does show how quickly these things can change. They were considered to be in a massive housing freefall, and now it appears they are coming out of it.

There are a couple of other articles posted by Diana Glick of CNBC that shows the dichotomy of the real estate market. There are massive foreclosures, but getting a house you want is competitive. Its not the way we want the market to be working, but there is a reason for buying in places like Arizona and Nevada: the future population is moving here. Boomers are just starting to make moves, and places like Anthem in Pinal County, and Vegas, and Northwest Arizona across the bridge from Nevada will be growth areas. Count on it.

Lastly, indicators are that October should be a decent month-we can expect it to be better than September, although probably not by a lot. It might be a lot better; its difficult to read that right now. We are only slightly better paced than September, but we do have good pending numbers, so I am not sure. We are in all likelihood going to top 8000 sales in October, so that is pretty positive.