Welcome back!
If I could sum up the Tucson real estate market over the last two months in a single word it would be Stable. We are not seeing any giant moves in either the positive or negative direction, although we are still slowly reducing our inventory. Prices are still falling in some areas, although many areas are seeing no more decline. There are a lot of buyers out there making bids on properties, but more about that later.
I have been so busy working this month that I did not get to do my March market report. So this time I will refer to both February & March’s numbers compared to both of those months last year. Of course I am using March’s number because that is the most recent data available. May’s market report will contain April’s numbers.
Home Sales Volume and Home Sales Units
Home Sales Volume and Home Sales Units both increased in both February and March this year. This is normal for this time of year. Overall, our home sales units are just slightly under what they were at this time last year. That actually represents improvement for our market over the activity a few months ago, which was well below the numbers from the year before. We won’t really be climbing out of the slump, though, until we start to see home sales units consistently rising above performance from the previous year.
Home sales volume is increasing month over month, but is still below last year’s numbers. Considering the lower priced homes that are currently on the market, this is not surprising.
Median and Average Sales Prices
Median and Average Sales Prices went up in February and back down in March. That seems likely the result of higher priced homes selling in February. We won’t see a consistent increase in either of these categories until the number of foreclosures has decreased substantially and our market values begin increasing due to the forces of supply and demand.
Pending Contracts
Pending contracts are a major future indicator of where the market will be in the very near future. For both February and March pending contracts increased. Again that is to be expected at this time of year and the percentages, 8.4% and 18%, while encouraging, aren’t large enough to indicate a major clearing of inventory.
Active Listings and New Listings
New Listings are increasing while active listings are remaining about the same. Well, active listings decreased both months by about 1.5%, which is really minimal. The good news is that we are not adding to our inventory, but we are reducing it by such a small amount each month that we won’t feel much difference in the market.
As of the end of March 2009 we have 7,415 active listings on the market, which leaves us an 8.13 months’ supply of homes at the pace that March’s sales were going. This is better than the 9.7 month supply we had going on last March (2008) and demonstrates that we have made progress reducing our inventory over the past 12 months. We will have a pretty robust market when we get the inventory down to between a 3 and 6 month supply.
On the Streets
I have noticed an increase in traffic/offers on my listings over the past 3 weeks especially. I have also taken several more listings during that time-frame. With the prevalence of short sales we are experiencing a delay in the numbers matching market activity. Additionally there are many that fall through so it takes a lot more activity to result in larger sales numbers. As of right now we’re slow and steady (so much for February’s roller coaster). Our prices are not spiraling downward as they are in other parts of the country, but we are not seeing any noticeable increases either.
It’s still a great time to buy, although I don’t know how long we will continue to have these extremely low mortgage rates.
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