Saskatoon real estate week in review: January 18-22 2010

Home sales in Saskatoon continued at a sluggish pace picking up just five units over the previous week to finish with forty-five houses and condos firmly sold, a drop of thirty-five percent compared to the same week last yearwhen 69 homes found a sold sign. Unless the coming week produces sales that are double what we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks we appear to be headed for a rather weak January, one which seems oddly out of place given the robust sales of the past two quarters.  The five-year average for total residential sales in January is 208 properties. So far this month just 114 sales have been reported.

Once again, new listings recorded strong numbers at one hundred and twenty-three homes, a gain of thirty-six compared to the week before and thirty-seven more than were listed during the same week of 2008.

Total active residential listings moved higher again for the third consecutive week and reached 751 properties, up fifty-six units from the week before, but sharply lower than the 1,192 Saskatoon homes available at the same time last year. This morning, there are 416 single-family homes and 290 condominiums offered for sale on the Saskatoon MLS® system. Those numbers are down from 710 and 406 respectively compared to the same time in 2009.

Sixteen MLS® listings were cancelled or withdrawn from the multiple listing service this week. Nine of those homes quickly re-appeared disguised as a new listing. An additional twenty home sellers adjusted their asking price, all but a few moving lower.

After sliding lower for three consecutive weeks, the return of some upper end buyers moved the average selling price of a Saskatoon home higher to $269,289, nearly twenty thousand dollars higher than it was last week and twelve hundred dollars more than it was during this same week in 2009. The six-week average continued to slide lower and reached $276,660, lower than last week by roughly seven thousand dollars, but ahead of the number recorded during the same week last year by about twenty-six hundred dollars. The four-week median sale price edged forward reaching $257,000, up four-thousand dollars from last week and lower than it was during the same period in 2009 by five thousand dollars.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

The average underbid fell back to $7,341, down from $8,997 last week, for an average discount of 2.4 percent of the asking price, a full percentage point lower than it was last week when Saskatoon home buyers managed an average discount of 3.4 percent.

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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra