Foreclosures are not sold via the mls, so I would think none. If the bank takes it back at the foreclosure and sells it as a bank owned property after the foreclosure, then it is in those numbers.

There is no way to separate short sales and bank owned properties except to identify them one by one by hand. I do that when I do a smaller geographic area, but could never it it for the whole county.

Last Sunday or the week before I did that type of report for certain zip codes. If you hit the tag Sunday Night Stats at the bottom of the post, you will get all kinds of data going back to 2000 in postings since early 2008.

It sounds like you may be a new reader. Each of my posts are not all inclusive. You would have to track back a bit through older posts tagged Sunday Night stats to get a better feel for why I am posting this one at this time. I have been blogging for over three years. Each post is not all inclusive and sometimes a continuing story, as this one is.

Thank you for reading, but it’s somewhat like coming in in the middle of a movie and asking how it started

1) What percentage of homes sold from Jan-Apr 2009 are foreclosures and short sales? What percentage of the above graphs are attributed to those numbers?

2) $ Per sq. ft. makes sense only if you are comparing apples to apples, i.e. similarly sized homes sold across months. $ per sq. ft for a 1500 sq.ft. SFH or Condo will always be more than that for a 2,500 sq.ft. SFH. Do you have that data?

3) Hitting a bottom cannot be defined by inventory alone, i.e. number of SFH’s sold in a year. I hope you are factoring in median price drops YOY. March 2009 numbers already show that your Feb prediction may not quite hold.

Overall, it’s easy to draw graphs to support your theory that “February was the bottom” but MLS numbers that came out yesterday show a decline to March 2005 pricing levels – what do you have to say to that?

http://www.nwrealestate.com/nwrpub/common/news.cfm

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008995228_webhomesales07.html

I like your blog, but I’d like to see some solid reasoning behind the data rather than just one-way graphs trying to prop up real estate and prove that the stimulus package is working.

I very much appreciate your $.02 BTW. Don’t sell yourself short In many ways I value your opinion more than The Tim’s.

1) I think a lengthening of the season will be another sign that the stimulus is as least in part responsible. Will the cutoff of 11/30/09 as to closing to be eligible for the credit, boost sales between 9/1 and 11/30? That is why I’m leaning against using “Quarterly” for 2009 and coming up with a different method. December closings aren’t eligible for the credit, unless we see an extension of the deadline before that time.

2) My concern about the whole “getting over 20,000″ thing, especially as I go back in years for prediction purposes, is the “double listed” crackdown. I can’t pinpoint when the mls got tougher on agents trying to show a property in two zones at once, causing double postings. Some of the decline is likely attributable to that, and how much is a big guess. What if 22,000 was really 19,000? The only way for me to know for sure is to separate it into zones and do same zone comparisons. A property listed in 2 zones will show as two closings.

As far as the stimulus package goes – I’m not sure I think you need to attribute a specific impact to that. I suspect it will bring a few buyers off the fence at the margin in the short term, but the impact will be fairly short lived. In other words, I would expect a bump – then a drop off. That’s the nature of promotions. Check out google trends for the term “$8000 tax credit”. I realize that isn’t the “whole stimulus”, but it gives a sense of people’s attention span.

In any case, I think that to see the market stabilize, sales need to climb back into the 20k per year range – whereas I think we’ll end up in the 12-13k range this year. My $0.02 – and probably worth just as much ;^)

Not sure I would use the exact method to predict 2009 that I did to predict 2008. While I was pleased with the degree of accuracy of that method last year, I’m not sure using 1st Quarter as the benchmark is appropriate in 2009. As you may know, this year as opposed to last year I am looking more at weekly vs. monthly stats.

I will do a prediction post similar to the one I did last year on April 17th as my Sunday Night Stats post. In the meantime, I will be doing the underlying data on my blog while I am determining my chosen prediction method for 2009.

It is important to me that I clearly identify whether or not the stimulus package is impacting the stats, as I need to get a feel for what may happen when the stimulus package drops off.

What level of sales would you need to see to credit the stimulus package for the improvement? Would sales have to be higher than last year for you to feel there had been an effect?

I was just commenting without doing the full math of a “prediction” there. So now we know where I stand on the 10,000 side of that comment. The number right now is 10,900 to be updated for any late postings of 1st Quarter closings. “higher than that and closer to last year’s…” is not a prediction and too wide of a spread. I try to pin that down better for you.

My appointment is in 7 minutes over at Starbucks in Park Place. Thanks for answering. I’ll check this again when I get back.

If the number is higher than that and closer to last year’s volume vs. 10,000, then we likely have seen bottom already.

so I thought you were saying if we are close to 15k, we’ve hit bottom vs. being closer to 10k