It’s time for NWMLS statistics. April is now in the books, traditionally one of the strongest months for home sales.
Here’s the NWMLS press release: Northwest MLS Brokers Report Highest Volume of Pending Sales in Eight Months. I guess “Lowest Volume of April Pending Sales in Nine (plus) Years” didn’t have the same ring. Better to pretend that seasonal improvements == strong market.
Here is your summary along with the usual graphs and other updates.
Here’s your King County SFH summary:
April 2008
Active Listings: up 49% YOY
Pending Sales: down 28% YOY
Median Closed Price*: $448,500 – down 3.6% YOY
Here is the updated Seattle Bubble Spreadsheet, and here’s a copy in Excel 2003 format. Click below for the graphs and the rest of the post.
Here’s the graph of inventory with each year overlaid on the same chart. As you can see, in April we already beat last year’s high point from September, and are now breaking higher into record territory daily.
Sales keep dropping, though the pace slowed slightly from last month’s record year-to-year drop. Most years do not see sales this sluggish until November through January. Regardless of what real estate agents may say about the present market, there simply aren’t many buyers out there right now.
Months of supply (active listings divided by pending sales) held basically steady for the third month in a row, clocking in at 6.2. April marks the eighth straight month of MOS above 6 (considered a buyer’s market).
Again, you can see that the faltering housing market this year is anything but “normal.”
Here’s the supply/demand YOY graph.
Here’s the chart of supply and demand raw numbers:
Here’s the SFH Median YOY change graph.
I’m certain that the local media outlets will focus in on the $9,000 month-to-month increase in the median price, and there will be no shortage of quotes from peppy agents declaring that we have hit the bottom. I will only point out again that with such a small number of sales, the median price is going to be screwed up. When the Case-Shiller data for April comes out in late June, I doubt we’ll see increasing prices. For a more detailed exploration of this phenomenon, read the post Median Price Not Telling the Whole Truth.