Weekly Wrap Up...Sales slow down... But so do New Listings...

My wife mentioned to me on Monday of the long weekend that it was the unofficial end to the Summer (Labour Day), and it really hit home that the long nights and beach weather is slowing slipping away (that couple with a frigid boat ride with the family!)  Tuesday brought back school for a lot of kids across Sudbury; and whether parents are opting for virtual or in-class version of school year 2020/21, wow, its a nice feeling to get back to some routine. It will be interesting to see what the routine continues to look like as the seasons continue to change. Will kids have hockey this year? Will there be trick-or-treaters in a few weeks from now? We’ll see how things shake out with the first few weeks of school and play it by ear.

Activity definitely feels like it's following the weather, and cooling down this week.  But when we start analyzing the sales; sure the number dropped but the competition that’s in the current market; WOW WOW WOW! Almost 70% of the deals this week were in multiple offers, that’s the highest percent we’ve seen in 2020!

New listings are down big this week. We actually hit the lowest number of new listings that we’ve seen in the last 16 weeks!  Again listings are typically seasonal and peak in the spring, and bottom out with the winter, but my prediction was that when school starts back up and we get routines going again we will see the listings come back from what has been a low last few weeks; that clearly wasn’t the case this week.  This will be an important number to continue to monitor, and although listings equalled the number of firm deals this week, both numbers were a lot lower than anticipated.

Sales definitely dropped this week, it was actually the same number as 2 weeks ago, but looking at it on a longer time horizon; its a sales number that we haven’t seen since the end of May!  This is right in line with what I have been preaching that the market is calming down; but when I pair that with the number of multiple offers we reviewed in the last point, it seems that the slowing market is still extremely active from a competition standpoint.  There may be fewer buyers out there but the lack of product still makes it very competitive.

The new listings almost matched the # of sales again this week; a positive sign that things are evening out, but when we factor in conditional deals (pending sales) it does throw the balance out of whack.  Pending sales are a good snapshot in time about how active the market is at any given time, and what we see with 27 pending sales is another very strong week of market activity. 

The market is funny right now; I think that's the best way of explaining it. The low price stuff seems to be going quickly and for the most part, and as much as I’ve been preaching the slow down in the market, things have kept chugging right along.  There is also a widening gap with ‘luxury' house values seeming to continue to increase (this week we saw sales in the Valley at 775k, 690k, and 610k!) as “luxury” homes continue to hit higher price points.  At the same time I say this, it feels like the market is a lot tougher and the prices homes may have seen (specifically in multiple offers) a month ago aren’t prices that sellers can expect today.  I think when we evaluate listings as a whole; we realize that the lack of available homes and the motivation of every buyer is unique; this explains that some homes have the ability to sell for big premiums while others hit the market with little to no showings.