Home sales grew and new listings fell lower this week. Both fell short of meeting numbers recorded during the same week last year. Saskatoon real estate agents reported 86 firm residential sales to the MLS® system, up 16 from the previous week, but down 13 when compared to last year’s numbers. Meanwhile, new listings declined to 204, down from 236 a week earlier, and 16 fewer than were listed during the same week of 2017.
Even as the market showed some sales improvements, the large disparity between closed sales and new listings caused inventory to spike higher for the second week in a row. As of this morning, there were 1953 Saskatoon homes for sale on the multiple listing service®, up 65 from last Saturday. That looks to be the sharpest two-week increase to MLS® listings over the past several years, but we are still well down from levels that we’ve become accustomed to seeing at this time of the spring real estate season. Last year at this time there were 2135 Saskatoon homes listed for sale. A closer look at the inventory by major housing types shows that we have 1032 single-family homes for sale, down from 1169 a year ago. Condo inventory sits at 794, down just 14 from the close of the same week last year.
On the heels of a week that produced a good number of high-end real estate sales, entry level home trades stole the show this week. With 17 transactions recorded below the $200,000 mark, both the weekly average sale price and the weekly median fell sharply lower to $315,109 and $301,000 respectively. The longer-term measures both took a dip as well. The four-week median price slipped to $310,500 losing nearly 10K from a week earlier and down almost $38,000 from the same week last year. The six-week average price fell eight thousand dollars from a week earlier to hit $333,699 taking a loss of $34,000 from a year earlier.
The vast majority of deals closed below the seller’s asking price netting buyers an average discount of $10,140. Just one buyer showed a willingness to pay more than list price. That deal reported a sale price that exceeded the seller’s asking price by $1200. Here is a breakdown of what the sales to listing price ratio looked like on this week’s sales. Please note that those sales that do show a sale price that is greater than the list price are all new properties that spent some period of time on the market, and most likely included additional improvements that were not reflected in the original list 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.
I’m always happy to answer your Saskatoon real estate questions. All of my contact info is here. Please feel free to call or email.
Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra
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