Has it already been a month?? Where did the time go last month?? It wasn't like I was in Sedona for a few days, or in New Orleans for almost a week, or spent a nice holiday long weekend with my wife's family, or had 3 different WARDEX meetings last lasted an average of 6 hours each, or anything like that at all.... oops... actually that is where the time went.
Well December is now upon us... and it is cold here in Arizona believe it or not. But I'm never too cold to offer you the latest listings report for the month of November.
Please note, I still don't feel 100% about specific data between new construction homes and existing homes with our new Data Exchange service. I'm finding that some Members of WARDEX are still having difficulty with the yes/no toggle switch. 'Yes' is for when a new listing in a new construction, and 'no' is for when a new listing is for an existing home. Yet when I run the totals... I get 113 new listings overall, but 22 new construction and 81 existing. Feel free to check my math but 22+81 does not equal 113. So still some learning curve's to overcome before I can confidently present the break outs on those kinds of listings. Please be patient.
Here goes..
Listings:
Today total listings available for single family residence equals 684 (down from 703 on November 1). This figure is down 100 units from 3 months ago. Some is due to sales, but I also suspect that plenty of units are simply coming off the market as expired listings.
There were 113 new listings for the month of November (109 in October). 5 homes have entered contract and these 5 homes have closed escrow already. The average asking price for these new listings is $243,571 (that's up from $236,055 last month). The median asking price is $215,950 (up from $192,000 the previous month). Up slightly in total units, but the average and median are up again and just wait to you see the info below... isn't anyone listening??
Units under contract:
37 homes entered into contracts in the month of October (down from 48 the previous month). The average asking price for homes that received contracts was $190,127 (down from $205,523 last month) and the median asking price for July was $169,900 (down from last months $194,900 figure).
Conclusions:
November is normally not a busy month around these parts. It was good to see the new listings hold steady in numbers. I'm actually surprised this happened as I thought it would go down as there were only 6 new listings that made the 'hot-sheet' at Wednesday's local MLS meeting (normally there are about 15 to 20).
I'm not surprised by the number of homes that entered contract though. Again, not a lot happens in November in a normal year. I peeked at total sales for November and the number is up from the previous month which is good, but what is bad for the new listings this month is the disconnect between where the sellers are pricing their homes... to the obviously lower price point where buyers are buying homes. I was really hoping to see the gap close... not widen.
I read up on plenty of ways that folks in my profession work to sell property on behalf of sellers. Staging a home correctly, marketing efforts on the Internet, taking pretty pictures, etc. There aren't enough pretty pictures out there that are going to convince a buyer to pay the asking prices right now. I've seen other Realtors talk about price as being not as important as the other efforts they undertake to properly market to sell homes. But here is where I disagree with them, buyers can be all happy about pretty photos all they want.. but if they can't afford the price point they will never actually go to the listing to see it with their own eyes. Therefore, they won't be writing any contracts.
This is still a buyers market no matter how many times I see others talking about how the market is maybe hitting the bottom price wise, sellers cannot continue to be this arrogant when setting their price. Just wait until the developers start resetting prices. That won't make for a pretty picture for sure.
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