New listings moderated some, slipping to 116, down from 125 last week, and finishing well below the 135 properties that were added to the Saskatoon MLS® system during the same period in 2010.
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Total active MLS® listings moved higher again this week, just as we would expect at this time of year. As of Saturday morning, we find 1158 properties listed for sale in the residential category of the Saskatoon multiple listing service®. That number represents an increase of just nineteen units from last week, the smallest weekly gain recorded over the past seven weeks. Year-over-year gains continue to get slightly smaller each week. Total listings are now up nineteen percent from last year, at this time. MLS® inventory was up close to thirty percent on a year-over-year basis as 2011 got under way. Today, buyers will find a selection of 663 houses and 430 condos showing an “active” status. At this time last year, those numbers stood at 555 and 367 respectively.
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Listings that were cancelled or withdrawn from the system remained steady at twenty-three. All but eight of those made another appearance on the MLS® system flagged as a new listing on the same day that they exited. Another forty Saskatoon homes sellers changed the asking price on their listing.
Activity remained strong at the lower half of the market as the median sale price of a Saskatoon home slipped nearly nine thousand dollars to $285,350. Still, a handful of sales recorded above the $500,000 mark pushed the weekly average selling price higher to $301,095. Our longer-term price measures both continued to decline. The six-week average selling price saw its fourth consecutive weekly decline as it slipped a little more than two thousand dollars from last week to $294,209 while maintaining an annual gain of less than seven thousand dollars. The four-week median sale price dropped sixty-five hundred dollars from last week to settle at $286,000 for a year-over-year gain of roughly seventy-four hundred dollars.
My early thought on this is that the declines are likely driven by greater activity with entry-level buyers who may have been attempting to beat the rules that saw maximum amortization periods drop by five years, to thirty years. That rule took effect on Friday of this week, so it will be interesting to see where prices trend from here.
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Overbid activity was weaker than what we’ve seen in recent weeks with just two sellers reporting a sale above their asking price, by just $1175 on average. Seven sellers managed to bag a full list deal while sixty-one of seventy sellers agreed to a discount averaging just under three percent, or $8992.
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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra
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