Monday Market Memo for the week ending May 5, 2008.  These are the statistics for the Mat-Su MLS for this week.

Well we went over 800 for our total inventory for the first time since last summer.  That was to be expected.  I think we will stay above this number for the rest of the summer.

There were only 24 pendings this week which is less than I expected.  This weekend has been very busy with a lot of showings.  I expect this activity to turn into pendings this week.  I was surprised at how many high end houses were shown over the weekend.  People were writing offers on these $400K+  houses as well. 

The sun is out, the real estate market is warming up.

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Wasilla Real Estate News Statistics for this week show a little life in the real estate market.  I have been waiting all spring for our normal jump and it started to show up this week.

Most of us have been experiencing more calls, more showings, and generally more activity in the market for more than a month but this has not been showing up in the statistics.  Just because people were looking, there wasn’t an increase in pendings and closings. 

This week both of those categories are up more than 30% over last week and over most of the previous 6 weeks.  If this new level of activity continues we will have a pretty healthy market.

I expected to see the total inventory top 800 this week, but with fewer new listings, and and increase in pendings the inventory actually dropped…a little. 

Foreclosure activity does not appear to be driving the market.  I just sent out my new Motivated Sellers list to the subscribers and was surprised at the small amount of foreclosures.  There are only 18  this week out of the 795 total listings.  But those foreclosures are selling.  The lenders are experiencing pain in some outside markets and they don’t want to hold on to foreclosures.

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Wasilla Real Estate News market statistics for the week ending April 21, 2008.  This includes Palmer and the rest of the Matanuska Susitna Borough.

It is amazing that this week is almost identical to last week.  We had almost the same amount of everything except total active listings.  Those were up by about 20 and will probably go over 800 by next week.

I keep expecting to see a surge in sales for the spring.  That would be a surge in pending and closed listings.  But this hasn’t happened.  They have stayed almost steady at 30 and 20 respectively. 

The average price for pending sales is down this week primarily because of about 4 places that sold for 50–60 thousand.  Don’t worry, they weren’t screaming deals, they were worth just about what they sold for.

I did notice several from the Motivated Sellers list on the pending sheet today.  Some of the motivated sellers haven’t become motivated enough to get their price right yet.  They will, they are going to sell eventually.

I wrote and offer today on a house and received an offer on one of our listings.  There is still a market, we just have to be “in the market”…not “on the market”.  You will know you are “in the market” if you are getting showings.  If you aren’t getting very many showings…you are only “on the market”. 

Just remember, there are about 30 houses selling per week.  And the average price is in the low $200s.  The vast majority of homes that are selling are under $300,000.

If your house is in the $300s or more, you are fighting with over 240 other sellers over 3 buyers a week.  You need to be the among the best 3 out of 240 other houses.  Sorry for the tough news, but you might as well know the truth.

We had one of our $300+ homes pend last week.  These sellers got serious about selling and lowered the price down to where there were finally people looking.  We went from almost no showings to several a week and finally an offer.  That is what motivated sellers do, they get it sold.

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Wasilla Real Estate statistics, including Palmer and the whole Mat-Su borough for the past week.

The market appears to be holding steady. There are more new listings, as expected in the spring.  The new pending and closed sales have been almost the same for the last 2 months. The following chart shows the stats for this week.

A very interesting phenomenon this week the stark difference between Days on Market, (DOM), for the pending and closed sales compared to the total active listings. I also notice that a lot of homes on my motivated sellers list turned up in the pending list this week…obviously they were good picks. I’m still updating the next one…it should be done soon.

Once more it is obvious that there are two markets out there.  There are 775 homes on the market with only 30 buyers a week willing to write offers on them.  Obviously, they only shop the houses that are priced and presented right, the other houses keep racking up DOM.

To get into the pending or closed category requires both price and presentation.  There are only so many homes that a buyer can see.  I showed 13 homes yesterday priced from $280,000–$380,000.  We started at 1 PM and didn’t finish until 8:30PM.   I don’t usually work on Sunday, but these people had come from outside and had a limited time schedule.  We found a couple interesting homes, but one was obviously priced better than the rest.  Guess which one interests them.

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This past week has been humming along at about the same rate as the month of March.  The market activity is better than the winter months have been, but it is significantly less than this time last year.   We seem to have a lot of people looking at homes, but not as many actually buying.

As you can deduce by looking at the chart above, the houses that are selling are the ones in the lower price ranges.  The average house on the market is price a lot higher than the houses that are selling. 

That means that the competition in the higher price ranges is fierce.  In fact for year so far, houses over $300,000 have been only 8% of  the total sales while they consist of 30% of the total inventory.  The only houses over $300,000 that are selling are the ones priced very competitively and that are presented very effectively. 

Click on the chart to the right to see the MLS stats for the last 2 years.  Notice especially the bottom line.  this is the line showing total sales for every month.  We are still waiting for a significant bump in sales for this spring.  I believe it will come…but it’s not here yet.

Kristan Cole has some good stats over on her site here.  She shows that the total sales are down almost 30% from last year.    Total volume is also down, as is the average sales price.  The only thing that I might disagree on is her number of a -3% appreciation.  I don’t have enough information to say that yet. 

Even though the average sales price per home is down, that doesn’t say that the average value of each home sold is down.  It just shows that we are selling more homes in the lower price ranges and fewer in the higher price ranges.  We still don’t have enough real data to tell if values are going up or down.  But my opinion is that the lower price homes are appreciating slightly and the higher priced homes are doing the opposite.

If you would like help buying or selling…give a call.  My cell number is 907 232–7900. 

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Wasilla Real Estate News market statistics for Wasilla, Palmer, Big Lake, Houston, Sutton, Talkeetna, Willow and every other little community in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

This update is for the week of March 24–31, 2008.

Although the statistics include the whole borough, about 80% of the real estate activity occurs in the Palmer-Wasilla Core area.  This is the area that is driving the market for the Mat-Su Valley

There were 60 new listings this week.  That is the largest amount so far this year.  We should continue to have a high volume of new listings come on the market throughout the spring.

The market has definitely picked up.  While the pendings and sales are a little higher than they were last month, the activity on showings and offers seems to be quite a bit higher. 

Right now, there still seems to be a reality gap between buyers and sellers.  I think that many on both sides are not understanding the reality of the market.  

Many sellers are not pricing their home to sell.  They are still in the mentality of a sellers market where a rising tide lifts all ships and even if you are overpriced, the market will eventually catch up.  Read yesterday’s post here.

But there are a lot of buyers that are also out in never-never land.  Remember…this is Alaska and you know how the bumper sticker goes.  Just because prices are free-falling in other parts of the country doesn’t mean that is happening here.  Take a look at this Fortune Magazine article about how much they are expected to continue falling in some places.

But prices are not falling here.  In fact at this point the average price is still raising, slowly.  The borough and others feel that the prices rose last year by 2%.  I think this is about right.   So just because prices are dropping dramatically in other parts of the country, it doesn’t mean they are dropping here.  In fact, at this point it appears as if prices will continue to hold steady or raise slightly in the future.

So, between sellers listing their homes at too high a price, and buyers offering too low of a price we are seeing a lot of paperwork flying around before we get the contracts signed off.  Buyers need to shop enough to know the market, and if a house is priced right…just buy it.  If you don’t, someone else will.  

I’m working on the Motivated Sellers list for the week.  It should be out tomorrow. Drop me a line if you want it.

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Wasilla Real Estate News market statistics for the week of March 17–24, 2008.  These statistics are for Palmer, Wasilla and the rest of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

We are watching the spring inventory rise. If everything remains normal the inventory will continue to rise through April and into May when it will level out.  This is the time people are selling their homes to make changes in the summer. 

It is a great time for buyers because they have more choices of properties. 

So far, the market seems similar to last year.  There are a few changes however. 

It is taking longer to sell a house.  Last year the average days on the market was about 100 days for the Total Active and about 80 or so for the houses that sold.   This indicates that we still have an oversupply on the market.

The average sales price remains about the same as last year, with just a slight increase.  There is about a 2% increase across the board, but the higher priced homes are not seeing any appreciation at all. 

It’s important to watch the new house prices.  There still are a few daring builders building spec homes.  These builders know that they have to build a quality home for the money and it needs to compete very aggressively with the 2–4 year old homes on the market. 

Nick Fonov just finished this very nice home in Heritage Farms Subdivision.  It sold within a week after it was finished.  He produces a very high quality home for the price that competes very well with existing construction.  This 1900 square foot ranch sold for close to the asking price of $285,000. 

He is finishing another similar home in Serendipity Subdivision on Fortune Circle.  It should be done by the end of April. 

Other builders are still building and selling spec homes.  Jess Hall continues to do well in his developments and a few others are also selling new construction homes on speculation. 

But this is not a time when any builder can just throw up a structure and expect to make a large profit on everything they build.  Care must be taken with the quality and the costs.  Buyers have plenty of alternatives with homes that are only 2–3 years old.

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Wasilla Real Estate News market statistics for the week of March 3–10, 2008.  These statistics include the whole Matanuska-Susitna Borough, including Wasilla, Palmer,Houston, Sutton, Willow, Talkeetna and the rest of the outlying areas.

However, most of the real estate activity is in Wasilla and Palmer.

As the chart shows, we had more new listings this past week than at any time since the beginning of the year.  The spring rush has started.   We should see many more new listings come on the market in the next couple months.

We also had the most pendings for the year this past week.  For that reason, our total inventory only grew by five.  Our absorption rate remains pretty steady.  In fact if we were to keep the average amount of pendings at 40 per month, we would soon be in a sellers market again.

We only had 18 closings because these are homes that went into contract during the slower month of February.  We should see the closings soon come up close to the pending number.

Buyers should pay attention to the fact that the total inventory is down from last year, sales are steady so I don’t expect to see much of a drop in house prices.  Houses over $300,000 are still selling slower than and they have to be competitively priced to sell.

I attended an Alaska Housing Finance Corporation seminar this past week at the Lake Lucille Inn.  It was an interesting meeting.  The consensus was that values for the past year increased in the Valley by about 2%.  The real estate market was still healthy in Mat-Su with a steady market. 

The outlook for the 2008 appears to be fairly solid, there are several large projects that are bringing more people into the valley.  The Target store, a new 1,500 person prison and other smaller business show that the Valley continues to grow. 

In fact, the vacancy rate for apartments is only 3%.  That means the rental market is basically at capacity.  As the valley continues to grow, it will likely need more places for these renters to stay.

Jess Hall, of Hall Quality Homes, spoke at the seminar.  His business is still running at close to capacity because of his foresight in purchasing land for development in central areas.  He mentioned that housing starts are running at about 50% of what they were in 2005.  He expects that to continue and feels that is a healthy rate of new housing.  Construction costs are increasing and he expects new construction prices to increase by summer to match the cost of cement, copper, and all the other materials. 

Interest rates remain low.  They are as low as they have been for the past 40 years.  We have become used to the rates in the 6% range, but many of us in the industry remember the days of 12% mortgages only too well.  I have a copy of an article somewhere write during those days that said we will never again see single digit mortgage rates. 

If you would like a copy of my motivated sellers list, read this post and drop me a line.

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Here are the Wasilla Real Estate statistics for the past week.  These numbers include Palmer, Wasilla, Talkeetna, Willow, Sutton and the rest of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

We had a slight increase in inventory but a pretty sharp increase in new pendings.  There are some definite signs that spring is on the way. 

Of the 35 pendings for the week, seven of them were new construction.  That is a sign of continued health in the market.  New construction can still compete with existing homes. 

Although prices do appear to be weaker than they have been in past years, builders are still able to compete in this market.  If prices were to drop dramatically there would be such a large gap between new construction prices and existing ones that builders would not be able to make a profit.  At this time, there is still a profit to be made in new construction.   But, the only builders that can compete are those with very sharp pencils.

There do seem to be a few more foreclosed homes on the market this year.  I have not been keeping close track of them.  I intend to add a feature to this site that will show all the foreclosed listings on the MLS system.  Check back tomorrow for that.

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Wasilla Real Estate News Market Statistics for this week.  These statistics are for residential single family home sales in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.  The vast majority of the activity is in the Wasilla and Palmer area but these numbers also include houses and cabins from Talkeetna to Sutton.

I have included the same statistics for this week in 2007.  You will notice that the DOM, (days on the market), are higher and the prices are lower for 2008.  This does show that although our market is still active, it is taking longer to sell a home on average and that selling prices need to be very competitive.

This week we broke a record that was only two weeks old for the fewest closings in a week.  We only had 12 compared to 13 a couple weeks ago.  It was a short week with President’s Day.  Most of the title companies were closed that day and we were coming off of some of the coldest weeks of the month when the contracts would have been signed.  Pendings are normal this week so it will take more time to see if it indicates a trend.

I compared the last six months to the same six months one year ago. 

• Sep 1 2007– Feb 25, 2008.  Total Sales 583, Median Price $202,371
•  
• Sep 1 2006–Feb 25, 2007.  Total Sales 710, Median Price $210,000

So we can say that fewer homes are selling for a little less money.  It appears that the Mat-Su Valley is dealing with the credit crunch by a slow down in sales and no appreciation. 

When we look at individual homes we still are finding that most houses purchased two to three years ago, sell for more today than than they did then.  I have found a couple sales where the price went down, but those are definitely in the minority. 

However, this market changes every month.  As the numbers above indicate, the pressure seems to be pushing down, not up. 

Here is what I found when I took a look at that trend for the last year.

The last 12 month sales sorted by price.

• $500,000 +   22 sales
• $400–500     41 sales
• $300–400    140 sales
• $200–300    571 sales
• $100–200    600 sales
• $100 –           80 sales

Here are the previous 12 months.

• $500,000 +   18 sales
• $400–500     37 sales
• $300–400    154 sales
• $200–300   685 sales
• $100–200   675 sales
• $100 –        104 sales

I think those are enough numbers right now…As Grace always tells me when I run a list of figures by her…”the men, they love the numbers”.

Give me a call if you would like more info on the market or any particular house.  Just call my cell 232–7900, dial the 907 area code if long distance.

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