Tucson Pending Contracts April 08
May 15, 2008
Post Tags: Tucson-MLS-Pending-Contracts
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It has been a while since we took a look at Tucson’s Pending Contracts. The last page of the Tucson MLS Statistic Report released each month contains a summary sheet which is very useful for getting a quick snapshot of where the Tucson Real Estate Market is headed in the near future.
Here is a glimpse into some of the things I see each month when I look at this page.
If you can’t read it, click on it, it will get bigger. You can download the whole Tucson MLS Statistics Report for April 2008. Printing out the last page so you can see what we are talking about is the easiest way to follow this analysis.
Or you can do what I do. Open the link to the report on one tab of your browser (firefox or IE 7) and switch back and forth. It is cheaper than getting a second monitor and video card.
Pending Analysis
Let’s hop to it. First thing I do is look to see the total number of pending contracts for the month. This is at the bottom, I can see there are 1547 pending contracts as we end the month of April. This is the number reported in the newspapers and if it is going up or staying high is considered a good indicator of the short term direction of the market.
That’s a bit to simplistic, we have to check the breakdown of the pending contracts by price and type.
Pending Contracts by Type
Pending Contract have cleared the inspection period and are waiting for Close of Escrow. This doesn’t mean issued won’t arise. Usually when a contract has gotten this far it will close. There are 383 pending contracts of the 1547 total.
Total Contingent contacts are usually still in their inspection/BINSR period. These contracts are early in their process and usually close the following month but can be delayed more than a month depending on the Close of Escrow date decided upon by the seller and buyer. The majority of the pending contracts fall in this category 1,007 to be exact.
Total Capa are those offers which are contingent upon the sale of a property the buyer possesses and needs to sell before closing on this offer. These can take some time to close because of the nature of the offer. There are 157 in this category.
We see a strong set of offers in April. This is a good sign.
Pending Contracts by Price
This is more a quick scan to see where the pendings are falling for the most part by price. I also want to see how many over a million dollar transactions are pending. This is a market indicator and will help me determine if the average sale price is effected by a higher than normal amount of sales activity in this range.
Over 1 million:
- 10 closed in April
- 22 Total Contigent
- 6 Total Pending
The Sweet Spot
Now I look for the sweet spot and move out in both directions from it. This month it is really easy to spot $200,000 to $249,999. This is the area price range where there are the most listing and the most activity.
There are several other things I check quickly. Active Listings, New Listings and %LP/SP which is holding at 95%.
I like this summary page. It gives me a good look back and a glimpse into the near future.
Finally, a quick update. Though there are 973 sales reported there were 1003 closed transactions for April. Thirty were late, 30 X $250 = $7,500 in fines. For the accuracy of the data, I would rather have them on time.
