Market Action For August 2007

The latest numbers have come out and they don't seem to follow what I and many other agents see. Statistics are often up to interpretation and you have to take into account the size of the sample. For instance, August 2006 vs August 2007, pending sales in Tigard are down 2.1% but year to date 2006 vs 2007 pending sales are down 17.1%. Which number is more important?

The month to month number is a sample size of 228 pending sales. The year to date sample is from 1689 pending sales. As I tell my clients, as an industry we try our best to figure out standardized numbers to make sense of this all. We are always a little behind in the numbers and so many factors have to be taking into account that until we have gone through the season we aren't really sure what happened.

In 2005, most agents agree that the market just fell off right around June from that meteoric rise we had gone through. But we didn't realize it until about 6 months later.

What I like to see is the graph on page 3. Right now we have 15,872 listings active versus 10,544 last year. No one thinks there are more Buyer's right now. Obviously Days on the Market has increased but it isn't as much as many think. A few people I talked to thought it was 120 days where the stats show 56 days.

Now where things get interesting is that the average sales price jumped quite a bit. This is where stat are easily skewed. I had a $700,000 home sell in a week and a half. But I have a home that I think is well underpriced and it is not selling. These are the things that can skew results.

I will put up the future Market Actions when they arrive. If you want to keep track of what is going on in your neighborhood, I can set up an automatic email program that will send you the latest activity. Email me at mike@mikecandoit.com.