Agent Will

I know people love statistics.  We watch them like hawks sometimes looking for some hint of what the future is to bring, to signal to us if it is a good time to buy or a better time to sell.  Some of us out there watch them daily, some weekly, some only monthly.  How do I know my readers love stats?  Because the two top pages viewed, aside from the front page, are the weekly stats and the monthly stat releases according to my site metrics.

Now many of you know that the big news recently was the crossing of the 20,000 mark for all listings in the REBGV.  Yup.  Big news.  My own markets followed crossed the 15,000 mark which I said back on April 19th, 2008 that we would likely hit that mark at the end of July… and lo and behold it did.  See the original post here

Now we see that we’ve stabilized quite a bit and I am prepared to issue a new prediction:  We willnot go much higher in active listings than what we have right now.  Back in April I said we would get 50% more listings.  That rate of increase is going to drop and I’d bet we’ll only see a marginal increase over the next few months.  Why?  Terminations, Cancellations, and Expiries.

Back on May 18th the weekly stats showed, for the first time, more removed listings than sales.  It was pretty much a one time occurrence until recently.  For the past six weeks removed listings have outpaced sales consistently from marginally more to three times more.  Of course, the end of the month always brings about more removals but four of the past six weeks have not been end of the month removals.

Why do I take in Cancellations and Terminations?  Because some realtors out there, rather than let an expiry hit the system, will terminate and relist, or cancel and relist later to avoid having their seller get calls from other agents, or to reset the property’s days on market. Fact is a removal is a removal, no matter how it gets removed.

And these removals and relisting will slow the growth of overall listings over the next several months.  Yes, there will be growth in overall listings as sales volume continues to be poor but not nearly at the same pace.  Heck, we just had our first 1000+ removal week which represented many listings from March/April.  Any guesses what will happen end of August representing many listings from April/May?

The next stat to look at is an update.  How many listings are vacant/tenanted.

Back on February 4th, 2008, I found that:

47.5% of Attached Active Listings were vacant or tenanted.

32% of  Detached Active Listings were vacant or tenanted.

Today those numbers are:

33.2% of Attached Active Listings were vacant or tenanted.

Add in Under Construction, an unreliable metric as developers often place a few examples on the MLS and do not remove the sold ones, nor represent the market as a whole with all available units and we get 46.7% (an extra 932 listings).

23.9% of  Detached Active Listings were vacant or tenanted.

Add in Under Construction and we get 25.6% (an extra 128 listings).

Very Interesting!  The number of clearly investor owned properties (those listed as Vacant or Tenanted) has dropped as a percentage of homes for sale.  So are Investors just sitting tight and renting out there homes?  It would appear so.

But what of all the homes (in particular, condos) under construction right now and due to complete over the next year?  They number in the thousands.  Keep watching this site for further updates.