Saskatoon real estate sales inched higher this week as agents reported a total of seventy-eight detached house and condominium sales, up just five from last week but falling short of the number of homes traded during the same week last year when ninety-four houses and condos changed hands.
New listings of Saskatoon homes bounced back from a surprisingly low number of just 109 last week to reach 140, twenty-two fewer than the 162 offered for sale over the same period last year.
Click the image for a larger version of the graph. 
In spite of new listing activity that nearly doubled up on sales, inventory finally took a break from its climb and held firm at 1401 with no change from the previous week. After seventeen consecutive weeks of gains to the active listing numbers forty-nine listings that expired during the finals days of May kept the inventory from moving higher. Today, we’re just seventy-eight units shy of the number of properties available at this time last year.
Taking a closer look at the “homes” categories, condo inventory increased by nine from last week to finish at 512, roughly two-dozen more than were available last year at this time. Single-family detached homes are sitting at 814, down about eighty-five units from the same week last year.
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Cancelled and withdrawn listings came in higher this week at forty-two. Twenty-six of those returned to the system bearing a new MLS number and a fancy “new listing” banner.
National housing news took an abrupt turn as talk moved from the question of “are we in a bubble?” to proclamations that the bubble has burst as news of sliding home sale numbers from markets across Western Canada found their way to the public domain. The Canadian Real Estate Association even released some revised predictions calling for a softening in home prices through 2011. I suspect it was a sudden realization that we may have just passed the peak that caused seventy-one Saskatoon home sellers to adjust their asking price this week.
Pardon me? Did someone say prices are falling?
You may recall that last week an unusually large share of sales at the lower end of the market pushed average prices lower. This week, those numbers sorted themselves out and a whack of upper end sales were firmed up including two homes averaging $830,000 each. Of the seventy-eight sales reported this week, fourteen were priced above $400,000. Area five saw an extraordinary week with seven of eleven sales topping $300,000. These factors all contributed to a week that saw the average selling price of a Saskatoon home leap to its highest level this year, $322,656. The six-week average pushed higher by nearly thirty-six hundred dollars to crack the $300,000 mark once again and finished up about nineteen thousand dollars over the same week last year. The four-week median moved in tandem gaining four thousand dollars on the week to reach $289,000 and picking up $19K compared to the same week in 2009.
Click the image for a larger version of the graph. 
Buyers were not oblivious to the fact that their positioned has strengthened some. The percentage of homes selling below the asking price continued to see some growth as seventy sellers came to the negotiation table and approved an average cut of $9,019 or a discount of about 2.7%. Five sellers got their full asking price and three managed to conclude a deal for more than list by an average of $4,090. Once again, the lion’s share of the average overbid can be attributed to one sale that went over by more than nine thousand dollars.
Click the image for a larger version of the chart. 
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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra
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