Saskatoon real estate: Week in review (May 11-15 2009)

Following a soft week, firm sales of Saskatoon houses and condominiums bounced back to reach their highest level for any week this year with a total of ninety-five units trading hands. You’ll have to look back to the final week of April 2008 when one hundred and seventeen sales were recorded to find a week that produced a higher number of sales. Units increased by fifty percent over last week when just sixty-three home sales were reported and finished slightly higher than the same week last yearwhen eighty-nine Saskatoon home owners saw a sold sign go up. This is just the second time this year that weekly sales were up on a year-over-year basis.

New listings, on the other hand, retreated from last week’s spike falling from one hundred and ninety-six to one hundred and thirty-five units and dropping more than forty percent from the same week last year when two hundred and twenty-nine homes were offered for sale. In spite of stronger sales and weaker listing activity, the total inventory of properties in the residential category managed to hold steady at 1,506, just one unit below last week’s number. As of the close of business Friday, nine hundred and seventeen single-family homes and five hundred condos were showing an active status. Last year at this time there were 1,051 active residential listings on the Saskatoon MLS.

One hundred and eight sellers made an adjustment to their asking price this week, perhaps the largest number of changes that I can recall in any given week. That doesn't include twenty-five of fifty-two canceled listings which re-appeared as new listings, most at a new price.

At the same time, prices continued to move higher as the average selling price of a Saskatoon home came in more than $8,000 ahead of last week to settle at $287,949. The six-week average took its sixth consecutive weekly gain picking up nearly three thousand dollars and reaching $280,090. Still, it remained about eight percent lower than last year’s number of $304,874. The four-week median held steady at $270,000 down just seven thousand dollars from this same week in 2008.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

Saskatoon home sellers found a little more love at the bargaining table as the average underbid dropped from $13,278 last week to $11,854 this week. With the increased asking and sale prices this week, that underbid represents a discount of just 3.4% compared to 4.5% the week before. Nearly forty percent of the homes that sold went within $5,000 of the asking price while another twenty-four percent sold in the $5,001 and $10,000 discount range.

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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra