All things considered, this was probably a good week for Saskatoon real estate buyers to purchase a home.
On the one hand, active residential listings fell again, slipping below 400 for the first time since the week of June 25-29. Only 8 new listings were offered up for sale. Not a big surprise really. Listing a home doesn’t rank high on most people’s priority list during the holidays. As of today, there are only 184 houses and 164 condos showing the “open” status on the Saskatoon Multiple Listing Service®. The selection of houses is rather poor to say the least.
On the other hand, sellers were eager to wrap up a sale for Christmas and the 37 buyers who did purchase homes were rewarded with greater flexibility than we’ve seen in a while. The average underbid crept over the $10,000 mark for the first time since the week of November 12-16. Most notable however, is the absence of overbid sales. That’s right, there isn’t a single home sale reported above the asking price. Zero. Zip. Nada! This is the only week in 2007 which didn’t produce any overbids.
The average selling price came in at under $250,000 for the first time since the week of November 5-9, largely driven down by an unusually high percentage of condos trading in Area 1. Nine of the eleven reported sales were condominiums and seven of those homes were priced below our average.
I expect that we’ll see listing activity pick up some over the coming week but home sales are likely to be similarly low, perhaps even lower in next week’s numbers. Typically, residential real estate sales reach their lowest numbers in December. If our market behaves in a typical manner, we can expect to see unit sales increase steadily over the first few months of 2008.
See a Google map displaying the boundaries of Saskatoon real estate “areas” here Data collection and calculation for our statistical reports
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Norm Fisher Royal LePage Vidorra