ARMLS STATISTICS FOR 2/2/2010

January Sales: 5,820
Pendings Rose through January
A look at last January's Statistics

Pending: 10,783

Pending SF: 9,270

AWC: 6,326

AWC SF: 5,439

CLOSED: 2,058

Closed Sf: 1,774

Active: 34,805

Active SingleFam: 27,297

Closed January: 5,820

Closed Single Fam: 4,988

This was your typical January: sales slow, inventory rises, pending sales start to show life, and everyone gets in a tizzy about how the market is about to collapse again. Don't be fooled by the short term aspects of home sales in January. January is a dormancy month, always has been, always will be. Also, you will note that pending sales have risen from the earlier part of the month, even though there was a pretty big last week of sales accounting for much of the activity. Why is that relevant? We don't have numbers from last week, but typically pending sales tend to fall after the end of the month sales report as many pendings convert to sales. Even with this normal drop, the pendings are growing from the earlier part of the month. That is a sign of demand strength as we climb out of the winter doldrums.

Lets look at last year's statistics:

We are 25% higher in pending sales, 600% higher in AWC contracts (a mixed blessing, but a contract is a contract), and down 33% in the number of listings. Closings were 20% higher as well. We are in far better shape than we were last year at this time. We can already project higher sales for February and March due to the larger number of pendings and AWC we are starting with. We won't know how well we are doing until late February, but I do expect to see pendings climbing by that time. Where inventory will be is another matter. We seemed to have hit a wall in inventory in late summer last year, but we are going into an inventory shredding portion of the year; I don't know if inventory levels will fall as far as they did last year. Prices do seem to have stabilized and even started to inch upward at this inventory level, so if inventory starts to fall significantly in the spring, we could see prices rise. We just don't know how many foreclosures are still out there. There are some, but are they going to be a significant segment of available inventory? That is the big question. I think we will shed some inventory over the summer, perhaps falling below 30,000 homes again, but I think that might our "normal" level of inventory. We will just have to watch it play out.

So, there is a lot of reason to be optimistic going into the spring, as sales should start to increase, and the inventory level is at very manageable numbers right now. They should start to decline a bit by March, and if we do, we can expect prices to start to rise in a substantial manner. This will lead to some restored confidence in the housing market, which will bring new buyers in as well. The trending is actually pretty good for us to have a decent year.