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Saskatoon real estate: Week in review (July 27-31 2009)

Saskatoon real estate: Week in review (July 27-31 2009)
Home sales showed no signs of slowing down this week as Saskatoon real estate agents reported one hundred and two single-family detached house and condominium sales to the MLS system, bringing about the third strongest sales week of 2009, and the fourth consecutive week of rising sales. The number of homes sold increased just four units from the previous week, and showed gains of twenty-two when compared to the same week last year.


The pace of new listings entering the market continued to slow as one might expect at this time of year sliding eleven units from last week to ninety-one, and down sharply from the same week in 2008 when one hundred and thirty-nine Saskatoon homeswere offered for sale.


Click the image for a larger version of the graph.



Active residential real estate listings took another slide this week as unit sales exceeded new listings for the first time in 2009. An additional fifty-one properties expired without a sale, most as the calendar turned to the month of August. This is fairly typical of month end, and throughout the year we’ve seen many of those month-end expired listings come back on the market during the first week of the following month, although that didn’t happen last month.


Total active residential listings are down eighteen percent from the same week in 2008 when they reached 1500 properties. Today there are 741 single-family detached houses and 393 condominiums showing an active status. During the last week of July 2008 there were 976 single-family homes and 418 condos for sale, so clearly, the inventory of houses has seen the greatest downward trend falling twenty-four percent in recent months, while the condo inventory has slid just six percent.



The average selling price of a Saskatoon home bounced back this week reaching $290,542, more than seventeen thousand dollars higher than last week. The six-week average edged higher on a week-over-week basis to $287,927, falling short of last year’s number by just eighty-five hundred dollars and reaching its highest point since the first week of November 2008. The four-week median climbed to $275,960, a gain of six thousand dollars over the week before, but remained down by twelve thousand dollars from the same week last year. The year-over-year declines are actually starting to look quite slight when compared with the much larger gaps we were seeing over the past few months.


Meanwhile, fifty-eight sellers adjusted the asking price that they’d initially put on their home, and an additional fifteen properties were canceled and re-listed on the Saskatoon MLS system, most at a new price.


Click the image for a larger version of the graph.



The average underbid on properties that sold below the asking price grew again reaching $13,550, up from $12,014 last week. This represents an average discount of 4.5% from the list price, approximately.3% higher than last week. Larger average discounts were driven higher by a few extremely large cuts to the asking price, while a slightly larger number of sellers actually found a buyer willing to pay a price within ten thousand dollars of the asking price.


See a Google map displaying the boundaries of Saskatoon real estate “areas” here


I’m always happy to answer your Saskatoon real estate questions.  All of my contact info is here. Please feel free to call or email.


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Our Saskatoon home search tool offers MLS listings represented by all real estate brands, presented with more detail than you’ll find anywhere else. Check it out here.


Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra

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