Inventory Slides into 13,000's.
Median Price moving sharply higher again?
Pending: 12,757 ( +467 from last week)
Pendings sfam: 10,983 ( +393 from last week)
AWC: 7,936 ( +216 from last week)
AWC Single Fam: 6,907 ( +186 from last week)
Active: 13,834 ( -187 from last week)
Active Sfam: 10,740 ( -164 from last week)
Closed 4/2-4/8: 1,439 ( -1432 from last week)
Closed Sfam: 1,164 ( -1198 from last week)
Median Price for April*: $135,900 ( + $5900 from March'12)
*Through April 10th
I had a full post for you today; unfortunately it was accidentally erased, and I just don't have time to rewrite the whole thing, so this will be a very brief commentary this week.
The stats at the beginning of the month don't always tell you much, but what is interesting is that pending single family sales now have exceeded the number of single family homes available. Fascinating, considering where we were April 8th, 2008. (55,700 listings, 6270 pending sales) When you compare those ratios, you can see why we are not in the same predicament in Arizona as we were four years ago.
Secondly, the overall number of listings fell into the 13000's- I didn't expect to see us that low, but here we are. Pending sales are growing too, so it will be interesting to see if overall pendings exceed listings. Its not a ratio that really means anything, but when you look at that as a relationship to previous time periods, it shows how far we have come back.
Lastly, we are already showing a strong jump in the median price from last month, when it rose $7000. I actually expect it to be higher than a $5900 gain by the end of the month. It can't go up forever, but it has a little room to run, given the low level of inventory available.
I had a whole thing on the new housing market as well, but I am not going to re-do that this week. I am actually going to start doing these posts on wednesday in the future so I can pull in the new home sales reports, as they are gaining significant importance in our housing market again. The index is running at its highest point since the middle of 2005, which is excellent news. That doesn't mean as many new homes; there are less subdivisions open than at point, but the sales per subdivision is getting back to a much stronger level. I'll talk about that in a future post.
One last thing: I am starting to think we are out of the danger zone for the resale market; whatever wave of foreclosed homes that they are calling for again doesn't look capable of altering the market for very long. We are beginning a job creation mode in arizona, which construction always does, and diagnosing a well patient is not that interesting. I am going to turn the blog more in the direction of the land market, which is what I prefer to talk about anyway, and about issues and property. The opportunity going forward is in land investment, which has not recovered in pricing yet. There is tremendous opportunity to buy land as an investment now, and there will be demand for it from builders and developers again, as we continue to grow. This blog will become about land investment, which is the area I actually work in. The housing market is important, and we will keep an eye on it, but more important to me is working with investors who want to take advantage of the coming upcycle in an asset, that unlike housing is becoming, is still under-appreciated.
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