Data: Pending Sales up 47% in January

Greetings Friends!

I love when I get to write these things; I love it even more when I have some good and positive news to share. The last 6-7 months the market has seen a lot of ‘corrections’, closed sales dropping by half and pricing erasing all the work of the first 6 months of 2022. We saw sales, as mentioned, fall to pre 2008 levels!

Sales are still lagging, but we have seen a huge uptick in Pending Sales. As someone that looks at the market, forward thinking, I pay more attention to Pending Sales than Closed Sales. Pending is showing what the market is DOING; Closed is showing what has already happened. Pending Sales lead to closed sales, and if the month of January is any indicator, we’re about to see things come off the lows.

The chart above shows PENDING SALES for a 3 year period for Single Family Houses. For this chart and others, I normally use Single Family only; if you want some data on Townhomes and Condos, please let me know directly, and I’ll get it to you. You can see a very steady decline since about April / May of 2022, with a couple upticks, but mostly down. The jump we saw for January still puts us about 27.5% below where we were in January of 2022, but the one month increase is the BIGGEST increase we have seen since right after COVID. We still have a long way to go to get back to the 3000-3500 range we saw during COVID, and we may not hit that level again, but I do see signs of strength, hopeful that this pushes us into the mid to upper 2000 range of PENDING Sales on a monthly basis; which would revitalize our markets.

People did not just stop wanting to buy homes. They just could not afford the home they wanted to buy when rates exceeded 7%. So they stopped looking. But they’re looking again, and when rates continue to decline, the amount of demand is going to continually increase.

Stay ahead of the market. Let’s connect on a Zoom or in person meeting to see how you can be READY for this type of movement. Click on “Schedule a Meeting” below (in Nothing But The Links).

Until next month…

-GZ