Saskatoon real estate week in review: March 22-28, 2015

The Saskatoon real estate market saw a welcome uptick in activity this week as firm residential sales increased by 15 when compared against the previous week. Total sales for the week came in at 87 for an annual decline of 13 home sales. As we close in on the end of the month, there are a total of 305 sales reported for the month of March, somewhat short of the 343 home sales reported by this time in March of 2014. It’s looking like March will likely wrap up about ten percent down from the same month a year ago. We can consider this an improvement from January and February. Sales for those two months were 20 percent off of last year’s numbers.

The number of new listings added to the multiple listing service® continued to show annual gains. This week, Saskatoon real estate agents brought 179 new listings to the system, down 25 from last weeks numbers, up by 14 from the same week last year.

The pace of inventory growth that we’ve seen in recent weeks took a slightly cooler climb as it grew from 1708 at the close of the previous week to 1725 by the close of business Friday leaving us up by nearly 400 residential listings from a year ago, just falling short of the record levels seen in late 2008. The inventory of available singe-family homes sits at 938 today, up from 802 a year ago. Today there are 591 Saskatoon condos showing an active status, up from 422 a year ago.

A stronger showing of upper end buyers pushed the median price of a Saskatoon home by about ten thousand dollars this week to $349,000. The average price moved in the same direction reaching $351,015. Those gains weren’t large enough to reverse the softening we’ve seen in the six-week average price recently. It slipped by about fifteen hundred dollars over the week to $349,159 to leave it down by a bit more than 10K in four weeks, and down more than six thousand dollars from where it stood a year ago. Meanwhile, the four-week median price edged up just a bit from last week to close out at $332,500 for an annual decline of about sixteen thousand dollars.

Sales above the asking price increased to 11 this week. The average overbid of $17,091 was skewed by some new home sales that clearly included improvements not anticipated in the list price. A further 10 buyers paid full asking price, while 66 others ground themselves a deal averaging a discount of $10,770.

Other notable real estate activity this past week included 61 cancelled and withdrawn listings (56 and five respectively), 18 expired listings and 73 price changes.

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Norm Fisher

Royal LePage Vidorra