Monday Morning Numbers 9/28/09

Good morning! It's time once again to take the pulse of our local real estate market while I let my third cup of coffee work on getting my pulse rate up a little:

Active Listings: 77
Contingent Listings: 64
Pending Listings: 47 (25.0% of the inventory)
New listings: 8
Months of inventory: 4.5
Click here for an updated price per square foot chart.

One number in this mix changed significantly this week - we dropped from 56 to 47 pending listings this week, and in terms of both raw numbers and in percentage of inventory, we're at a 5 month low in this category. What happened last week was that we saw a lot of closings. I use a three month sold number to calculate the months of inventory on the market, but I don't report on it directly. That number shot up to 95 this week - a high point for the year - which resulted in the 4.5 months of inventory that you see above. This is the lowest level of inventory that we've seen since probably some time in 2004.

I doubt that we can sustain the level of closings that we've seen for the past couple of weeks for very long with the inventory that we have. Not all of those contingent listings are going to go pending and eventually sell. And like I said a couple of weeks ago in my REO update, we aren't going to see a big influx of foreclosures in our inventory in the short to medium term.

There's one other thing looming that could have a dampening effect on sales. The $8000 first time buyer tax credit is set to expire soon. Buyers need to close by 11/30/09 to qualify for it, meaning that at this point, if they want this credit, they'd better get into escrow on something in the next week or two. And short sales are realistically out of the question for this timeline now (have been for a while). The National Association of Realtors is making a big political push to get this credit extended and/or expanded, but it's anybody's best guess what's going to happen with it. That credit has been a big part of stabilizing the housing market. Write your Senator & Representatives, folks. The declining housing market helped to get us in this mess, and it's going to have to play a key role in the recovery.

That was a longer than usual MMN post. Good coffee, what can I say? Come back later this week for an update on the condo market.