Saskatoon real estate week in review – Aug 31-Sept 4 2009

Following one of the quieter weeks we’ve seen since late spring (65 units) Saskatoon real estate sales bounced back with a total of one hundred and two detached single-family home and condominium sales reported. This week is one of about six that managed to crack that one hundred-unit barrier in the past couple of years. While this week was unusually strong, the same week last yearwas remarkably weak, so home sales nearly tripled on a year-over-year basis from last year’s miserable thirty-six-unit tally.

New listings pushed forward as a number of properties that expired from the Saskatoon MLS system at the end of Augustfound their way back onto the market for another go. One hundred and twenty new listings made their way to the system, an increase of twenty-nine homes compared to last week, but well below the one hundred and sixty homes that were offered for sale during the same period last year.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

The majority of the seventy-three Saskatoon homes that did expire last week haven’t been relisted, at least not yet, so total active residential listings took a pretty good tumble, falling seventy units from last week to finish at 1082. Inventory is sharply lower than it was at this time in 2008 when a total of 1704 homes were showing an active status on our system. Included in the active residential listings are six hundred and twenty-three single-family homes (houses) and three hundred and seventy-five condominiums.

Forty-nine home sellers adjusted their asking price this week, and sixteen of thirty-nine canceled or withdrawn listings re-appeared wearing the “new listing” banner, most at a lower price.

The average selling price of a Saskatoon home took a pretty good bounce this week to reach $295,070, nearly sixteen thousand dollars above last week’s number, and ninety-five hundred dollars higher than the same week in 2008. The six-week average took a turn climbing four thousand dollars from last week to finish at $285,679, three thousand dollars higher than it was at this time last year. The four-week median selling price stayed level on a week-over-week basis at $274,500, but pulled ahead of last year’s number by ninety-five hundred dollars. This is the first week since Marchthat all three price measures showed gains over last year.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

The average underbid on Saskatoon homes that sold for less than the asking price made its way back to five-figure territory after dipping below ten thousand dollars for a few weeks. It came it at $11,430, or about 3.75 percent of the asking price. The percentage of sellers who managed to make a deal within ten thousand dollars of their asking price fell from seventy-seven percent last week to sixty-five percent.

All three of the “overbid” properties were new homes, and two of the three had been on the market for two and four months so the extra dollars that the seller received likely resulted from some additional improvements made to the homes.

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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra