A short week brought declines in both listings and sales to the Saskatoon real estate market. Local agents reported just seventy-three firm house and condo sales this week, a decline of nine from the previous week and well off of the one hundred and thirteen sales reported for the same week last year. With just one more business day for our MLS® in May it appears likely that unit sales will fall below those generated last May.
So far this month we have 328 home sales compared to 369 for the same month last year. New listings of Saskatoon homes tumbled further dropping nearly a third of last week’s volume to just one hundred and nine, down from one hundred and twenty-seven for the same period in 2009.
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Still, active residential real estate listings managed to move higher for the seventeenth consecutive week to break the fourteen hundred mark for the first time since the week of June 22-26 2009. Total active listings continue to close the gap on last year’s numbers but still remain slightly lower than the 1502 homes Saskatoon home buyers had to chose from at the same time last year.
The current condominium inventory moved ahead of last year’s numbers finishing the week at 503 units, a gain of just three compared to the same week in 2009, but higher just the same. As of this morning, there are 822 detached houses for sale, down roughly ten percent from the same week last year when 910 of them showed an active status on the Saskatoon MLS® system.
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Cancelled and withdrawn listings declined from last week with just thirty-two homes showing activity in those categories. Twenty-three of those returned to the MLS® on the very same day with their “days on the market” reset to zero. Sixty-three MLS® listings adopted a new pricing strategy this week. Properties priced below the average took an unusually high share of activity this week and pushed the average price of a Saskatoon home lower by more than fifteen thousand dollars compared to last week to just $279,533, its lowest point since the week of March 1-5.
The six-week average continued to form a downward curve as it dropped twenty-four hundred dollars from last week to $296,432. That measure still sits about fifteen thousand dollars higher than it was for the same week a year ago. The four-week median was up an equal amount on a year-over-year basis, but showed a drop of four thousand from last week and finished at $285,000.
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Overbidding was not a popular approach this week as just three home sellers managed a deal above their asking price, and those that did settled for fairly small bonuses averaging just $183. An additional six sellers accepted an offer at full list price while sixty-four of the seventy-three sales reported this week came in below asking by an average of $7,237, or an average percentage discount of 2.5.
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