UPDATE: Pending appear to be up over June but not as far as reported in the Tucson MLS. Since we are dealing with live data every statistic we pull is a snapshot at the time of the pull. Dates used in a pull are not the dates of the entry, for example a pending date between 07-01-2010 and 07-31-2010 can be entered on any date. This morning when I started digging into this issue of the number of pending sales I got 1361, not the 1703 reported.
I tired to reproduce that number or something close to it but couldn’t get the same results. Just a few minutes ago I ran the query again and got 1364. Someone is still inputing July Sales into the system. (this happens every month.
How Pending Sales are Calculated
Pending contracts are:
- Residential Sales
- With a pending date in the current month
- with a status of Contingent, Active CAPA, or Pending
- In the 13 areas designated by the MLS as “Tucson Area”
783 Contingent
249 Active CAPA
332 Pending
Total 1364
This total is still over last month and over last July, but not 47% higher. END UPDATE
The Tucson MLS just released the Statistics Report for July 2010 a few minutes ago (Friday evening go figure). I’ve not been looking forward to the final Close Transactions. The report reflect 792 closed transaction. That is the lowest number going back over 10 years for a July. Even taking into account that two years ago they narrowed down the reporting to 13 areas around Tucson instead of everything entered into the system.
July Closed Transaction Down
I knew coming into this month it was going to be down. I didn’t know how far. I guessed between 750 and 850 f0r the final stats on the month. Even though the report has 792 the MLS system is already showing late entries. The number this evening stands at: 814. There are more to come, every month we see more and more late entries.
July Pending Sales Way UP
What I didn’t expect was the Pending contracts for July to 1703. That is up over 43% from June and more than 37% over July 2009.
Since we don’t have pending figures going back in the report I’ll have to pull past reports. I’ll do that in a day or so and see how large an increase this is. It might be the most pending contracts we have seen.
Search Activity Way Up
This is strictly anecdotal information. But this week we have seen the highest number of pageviews on site searching for homes since January.
This blog’s unique visitor and pageviews for the weeks stand at : Unique Visitors: 1737 Page Views: 4868 and counting.
Now it is time to throw some veggies on the grill and get out of the office.
Dave,
I found the July numbers to be fairly impressive. I was surprised to see May/June numbers not take much of a hit and July’s numbers aren’t bad at all when you factor in the end of the tax credit.
The 1703 reported pending sales has got to be a typo, as you’ve noted from current pending numbers of 1364. Still, that’s also an impressive number in light of all the demand that was pulled forward from the tax credit.
I look at monthly foreclosure numbers here: http://market.defaultresearch.com/
The last couple of months have been trending down to the low 300s, which matches July REO sales. That’s a good thing, as the REO inventory looks like it’s staying stable rather than increasing.
A couple of questions:
1) I haven’t found any good measurements for historic cost/sf. Is there anything out there? I’d be curious to see if it’s stayed static.
2) The %age of REOs + Short sales has been running at 45-49% for the last few months. If you combine REOs + Short sales + new home construction as a %age of sales, how would that compare with %age of sales during the 2004-2007 boom times?
I ask this because I’d expect REOs + short sales (SSs) to be near zero during that time and am wondering if REOs + SSs are crowding out resales or if they’re merely offsetting what was formerly new home construction as a %age of sales.
iflyjetzzz,
1) There isn’t any collective data on cost/sf that I’m aware of. On individual basis you can figure it from home to home from prior sales data, but location and amenities vary widely so there is no rule of thumb and probably one reason there is not place to find this data.
2) Until last year most local MLS’s didn’t even track REO or short sales. During the “boom” no docs time there was no reason for a short sale or REO, if you needed to sell you set your price and someone would give you $5000 more than you were asking.
As to REO + Short sales crowding out resales. For some people looking for a bargain possibly. But for many there are some thing more valuable to them than price. They don’t want to buy an REO or Short Sale for the same reason they don’t want to buy are REPO or Flood Damaged Car.
There is new home construction. Less of it now because the demand is down, and financing means you have to actually be able to put something down and pay the monthly payments. Most builders aren’t building McMansions anymore either. They have scaled the sq/ft way back from those boom days.
I would say it is more an offset of NC vs hurting resales. But the sale of REO’s and Short Sales have brought resale values down from the Boom years.
Dave
Dave wrote: “I would say it is more an offset of NC vs hurting resales.”
That’s what I had suspected. I consider that to be longer term healthy for Tucson’s real estate market – it may be painful right now to have such a high percentage of REOs and SSs currently, but if it’s replacing (previous) new home construction, that tells me that Tucson’s real estate market is slowly burning off overbuilding from the boom years.
iflyjetzzz,
I would agree and there is more burn-off coming. This is healthy considering the over-growth we experienced.