It’s time to peek again at market activity for single family homes.
As always, this review compares listings and sales for a four week period. This week the period under review is from July 28 to August 14, for both 2005 and 2006. If you saw the most recent report for single family homes, you may have noticed that this report period overlaps with the previous one by one week. It’s an anomaly that won’t recur.
This report is also a bit different in that it only looks at single family homes, whereas my previous report included strata duplex as well. It makes comparing the previous report with this one a bit problematic. Further reports will be more directly comparable with this one.
There was virtually no difference between report periods as to the number of new listings that came to market: 400 last year, 402 this. So, if you noticed more For Sales signs, it may have been partially due a carry over from earlier in the year, and partially due to the fact there were more purchase contracts reached in the 2005 period than in the 2006: 264 versus 237. That’s a decrease of about 10 percent.
Then there is the matter of sales velocity – the average number of days on market of a property before it sells. That figure for the 2005 period was 34 days, but for 2006 it rose to 43. This sales velocity figure includes data only for homes that actually sold, and not for homes that were listed and failed to sell.
Although sales velocity and percentage of sales were both down somewhat from the corresponding period last year, average and median sales prices were up by about $25K and $28$, respectively. For the last report period, the average selling price was slightly under $529K, with the figure for median selling price coming in at $475K. Period over period movement in the median figure is probably somewhat more indicative of market movement because, as has been pointed out before, averages are always easily skewed by a few high priced sales in any period.
Next week it’s condo report time. Until then, I welcome any questions or comments you may have.
Bye for now,
...Victoria's blogging real estate professional.
