December is always predictable. It’s consistently the weakest month of the year for the Saskatoon real estate market. While the market continues to perform remarkably well for the season, the sales slide continues.

This past week, local agents reported just 63 Saskatoon homes sold, down from 84 the previous week, but up 13 units from the same week last year.

New listings continued to flow into the MLS® database at a pretty good clip. Last week, 120 home owners signed a new listing agreement. That’s 18 more homes than were listed the previous week, and 50 more than we saw over the same period of 2019.

With new listings nearly doubling sales, the inventory of active Saskatoon real estate listings moved higher, which is quite unusual for this time of year. By the time the dust settled, the inventory of active listings in the residential category moved from 1103 last week to 1122 today. At the close of the same week last year there were 1402 Saskatoon homes for sale.

Today, there are 534 detached homes for sale, way down from 829 a year earlier. There are also 524 condos available to buyers, up from 507 at this time last year.

Let’s have a quick look at how sales (demand) and listings (supply) are playing out.

Interestingly, the 30-day sales number actually rose this week. That’s the first time that’s happened in a couple of months. Over the period, local REALTORS® have reported 358 homes sold. Even with the modest bump to the listing inventory, these figures bring our “months of supply” slightly lower. We have 3.1 months of inventory today, down from 3.2 last week.

Even with a small selection of available homes, the next three weeks may present some of the best opportunities that buyers have seen in months if something comes up that strikes their fancy. These can be lonely weeks for a seller who needs to get moving. Viewings will begin to fall off sharply this next week as people focus more on the holidays. At least, that’s what happens typically. This year has proven to be anything but typical. 

There was not a great deal of movement for any of the price measures we track. The average selling price of a Saskatoon home moved up just two thousand dollars from last week to $356,528, while the weekly median nudged up 5K to $350,000.

The six-week average price fell just a few hundred dollars to record its sixth consecutive weekly decline. It’s at $334,306 this week, which is still up by five thousand dollars from this time last year. The four-week median price rose for the second time in two weeks to reach $328,500. That’s up just over ten thousand dollars annually.

Above list price sales came in at six. The average overbid was $4,850 with three of those six sales selling $100 above the asking price, to leave the other three lucky sellers rolling in Christmas cash. Meanwhile, 53 of 63 sales were reported to have sold at a price below the list price by an average of $11,952.

Here is a breakdown of what the sales to listing price ratio looked like on this week’s sales. Please note that this chart may show over list price sales, even when I have reported the number as 0. Those sales are typically new properties that spent some period of time on the market, and most likely sold and included additional improvements that were not reflected in the original list price. For example, a new home listed at $450,000 sells at a price of $490,000 after 120 days on the market may have included a basement development that was not anticipated in the listing price. We report these to you as “at list price sales”, which is likely too generous in some cases, but it’s simply not practical to obtain the full details of each sale.

More weekly stats and numbers for those who love them. 

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Norm Fisher

Royal LePage Vidorra