Saskatoon real estate week in review - August 10-14 2009

Following one of the quietest weeks that we’ve experienced over the past couple of months the Saskatoon real estate market picked up a bit of steam again as sales of single-family detached houses and condominiums bounced back to finish the week with ninety-one homes sold. That represents an increase of fourteen properties compared to last week’s production, and a more impressive gain of thirty-two units when compared against the same week last yearwhen just fifty-nine homes changed hands.

New listings remained steady this week with one hundred and two properties being offered for sale on the Saskatoon MLS system, up just one from last week, but down by fifty-five properties from the same period in 2008 when one hundred and fifty-seven Saskatoon homeswere listed.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

After eight consecutive weeks of losses the inventory of residential listings refused to slide further and finished the week at 1213 units, up one from last week’s close. Still, this year’s active inventory is twenty-two percent lower than the 1555 residential properties that were available at the same time last year.

Through the course of the week, forty-nine home sellers adjusted their asking price in hopes of attracting a buyer before fall sets in. Additionally, seventeen of twenty-nine canceled or withdrawn listings made a second appearance on our system wearing a “new listing” flag.

The average selling price of a Saskatoon home remained steady on a week-over-week basis at $281,095. The six-week average took a small gain from the week before to finish at $285,337, not quite seven thousand dollars shy of last year’s $292,285. The four-week median held firm at $275,000, coming up just seven hundred dollars short on a year-over-year basis.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

The average underbid on properties that sold below the asking price inched up to $10,734, from $9,173 the week before. That represents an average discount in the range of 3.7%, about a half of a percentage point higher than last week. The percentage of sellers who managed to secure an offer within $10,000 of the asking price rose from sixty percent last week to seventy-two percent this week. Discounts of $25,000 or more returned to the chart after being absent last week for the first time that I can recall as four percent of Saskatoon home sellers gave up a pretty big chunk of change in exchange for a sold sign.

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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra