NWMLS: Closed Sales Diverge Even Further from Pendings

Time to take a look at August market statistics from the NWMLS. Here’s the NWMLS press release: Northwest MLS brokers report brisk activity, multiple offers, "irrational delays" by lenders.

Here’s your King County SFH summary, with helpful arrows to show whether the year-over-year direction of each indicator is positive or negative news for buyers and sellers:

July 2009	Number	MOM	YOY	Buyers	Sellers
Active Listings	9,491	-3.7%	-20.6%
Closed Sales	1,609	-6.8%	+5.0%
SAAS (?)	1.88	-7.7%	-13.4%
Pending Sales	2,311	+4.2%	+31.5
Months of Supply	4.11	-7.6%	-39.6%
Median Price*	$375,000	-2.3%	-11.6%

Breaking from the pattern we had seen in recent months, closed sales declined in August, falling even further below the pending sales levels from the previous months. Barring an unexpected and incredibly uncharacteristic surge in closed sales in September or October, it looks like July’s 1,727 will end up being the one-month maximum.

I’m having some trouble uploading the spreadsheet from here at PAX, but before I head to bed tonight I will post 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.

Inventory for most of this year has been remarkably flat.

Here’s the supply/demand YOY graph. In place of the now-unreliable measure of pending sales, the “demand” in the following two charts is now represented by closed sales, which have had a consistent definition throughout the decade.

Diminishing YOY increases for sales in August. Will be interesting to see if we drop back into negative YOY territory before the year is up.

Here’s the chart of supply and demand raw numbers:

Here’s the median home price YOY change graph:

And lastly, here is the chart comparing King County SFH prices each month for every year back to 1994.

August 2009’s SFH median came in $10,000 below August 2005. I bet it would really suck to be somebody that was considering buying in August 2005, but started a bubble blog instead. Or not.

Here’s a few news blurbs to hold you over until tomorrow’s reporting roundup (which will probably be posted later in the day than usual due to it being a Saturday, and also PAX). [Update: I decided to hold off on the reporting roundup until Monday, since a lot fewer people read the site on the weekend anyway, plus with the holiday weekend I imagine traffic will be even lighter. Have a great weekend everybody, see you Tuesday.]

Seattle Times: August home sales strong in Puget Sound region but median prices continue to sag
Seattle P-I: Pending home sales spike, according to MLS report