I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the daily trends in the MLS and have noticed for several weeks now that price reductions have now outnumbered new listings on an almost daily basis. In past years, when almost all houses were selling fairly quickly, we noticed that a small percentage of houses required drops and there was usually a decent number increasing their prices.
Now, it seems that as days on market have increased for many sellers we are finally getting that reality check in place that was needed. Granted, it does seem that the majority of these price drops are in the outlying areas of our MLS region, but the inner-city urban spots are not without their own new reality.
What I like right now is that we’re getting a nice balance of buyer and seller activity, which, for my own personal business/team, means that we’re likely going to be growing our business over the next year or more with some very nice results.
I love you Reba Haas. When I’m ready to sell my two houses I’ll call you.
Hi SL, I don’t know if you’re being serious or mocking me since posts don’t register sarcasm, but it is fun to see those remarks on RCG! I hope you do actually like what I write here. Let me know if there are topics you’d like to see addressed.
Keep in mind that over the life of a listing, price reductions can happen 10 times or more. Numerous people are trying to create what amounts to an auction-in-reverse by starting out high, and then knocking a certain amount off every week. So a few of those in the mix can easily cause reductions to exceed new listings.
Whoooo’s YOUR real estate Mommy?
I enjoyed this post about market movements as well. I haven’t seen any other data or analysis tracking the rate of price reductions.
My gut feeling from watching particular homes and prices and being addicted to Redfin was telling me that price reductions are picking up but it is nice to see some actual analysis.
Could you take this topic a bit further and create a chart that graphs the number of price increases, declines, maybe include price per square foot etc so that we can get a visual of what is happening? It would be very interesting and would probably correlate very closely with a homeowner sentiment survey.
I thought this was going to be about sale price. The intra-month numbers there have been troubling for almost two months, but last month didn’t turn out so bad. I doubt we’ll dodge a downturn again, but who knows.
BTW, not all price reductions show up in the stats. Some are expired and then re-listed at a lower price.
Finally, I really wish the NWMLS would switch that page to a 7 day market watch. I think that would be more useful since some agents don’t enter things on weekends, and you don’t have any closings on weekends.
Correct, Kary, they don’t if there is cancellation or expiration and re-list with a new price. A good reason to have an agent check property history if you’re getting background on a house.
As for Peter’s request, the stats are updated in the 24-hour market watch and I am not aware that the MLS does a regular analysis of that specific data. It’s also too much for one agent to try and track daily since the data is constantly in flux and it depends on what time of day you’re looking at it to know if you’re getting relatively accurate daily data.