January listings report (2007)

Wow, that first month of the year really flew by. I blame my perception of how quickly January came and went on the NFL football playoffs, especially while my team was in it (the first two weeks). Now it is time for the Big Game this Sunday (I have no dog in the hunt, but I'd like to see the Colts win so that their QB gets the proverbial monkey off his back, man I'm fed up with all kinds of media these days... including the sports media) .

Now is also the time for the monthly listings report. Let us see what lessons the sellers have learned from last year.

Disclaimer: All data is compiled from the Data Exchange that I am a paying member of (WARDEX). All data is considered reliable but not guaranteed.

Listings:

Today total listings available for single family residence equals 679 (up from 634 on January 1). Looks like some extra sellers were waiting for the new year to hit so they could enter the market, I wish the number didn't climb as high as it did.

There were 152 new listings for the month of January (105 in December 2006). 11 homes have entered contract of these new listings, but none of these have closed yet. The average asking price for these new listings is $236,404 (that's up from $227,322 last month). The median asking price is $216,400 (not much change from $215,000 the previous month). Well I'll have some comments about this in the conclusion section below.

Units under contract:

43 homes entered into contracts in the month of January (up from 30 the previous month). The average asking price for homes that received contracts was $195,985 (down from $202,373 last month) and the median asking price for January was $189,900 (up from last months $180,500 figure).

Conclusions:

As far as new listing go, I was seeing some nice positives in the last quarter of last year. Total numbers of listings were falling and the number of new listings was also falling. I was hoping that trend would continue into the new year. Well that didn't happen.

Let's take a look at the 11 new listings from January that already are under contract in less than 30 days. The average price of those listings is $184,216 and the median is $189,900. Compare these numbers to the average and median prices for the all of the new listings last month.

There were 28 new listings that hit the market between $300k and $479k last month and 13 of them are priced at $160 a square foot or lower. To me that is the sweet spot based on all of the pending information I have looked at. Which tells me that just a little more than half of the new listings are overpriced for this market. Folks, it is simply not a sellers market.

I'm not saying that everyone should lower their prices, but I think sellers need to be more aware of the price point that is actually attracting buyers in today's market.

The total amount of pending transactions are up from last month, but I'm not tracking any significant closed transaction increases (report on that later this month). I fear that those sellers in the market may be heading for some of the same mistakes as last year. I guess we will have to stay tuned in the coming months to see if this was just a hiccup because of the new year.

Overall, bad news for new sellers on the market unless they are priced in the sweet spot of $120 to $160 a square foot in general.

See you all again next month...