Following a three week party brought about by the rush to beat the new mortgage qualification rules, this past week looks more like a nasty hangover as Saskatoon real estate agents reported just 47 firm residential deals to the MLS®, our slowest sales week since early March. To be clear, this is the time of year when we expect to see large declines, but 47 sales leave us down 31 from last week, and below the same period last year by a couple of dozen sales. New listing activity moved in the opposite direction as agents brought 196 properties to the market. That’s up about 30 from last week, and not a huge surprise given that 141 listings expired at month end without a sale, many returning with a fresh new MLS® number. 196 is actually down from last year’s levels when 212 properties were added to the system.
In spite of the large disparity between sales and new listings, cancellations and expired listings kept inventory numbers moving lower for the fourth consecutive week holding on to the clear trend that began four months ago after available residential listings peaked at 2175 homes. Today, we’re down to 1799 for a weekly drop of 33, and lower than a year ago by 117. As has been the case for many months, the losses can all be counted in the single-family homes category which sits at 970 units today, down from 1088 a year ago. Condo inventory shows some small annual gains growing to 661 properties from 652 a year ago.
Spread across a small number of sales, some big deals at the upper end of the market are skewing this week’s numbers higher. We have a sale at $1.2 million and another at $975,000 that are driving the weekly average sale price up to $343,157. The larger of those two sales is the 14th sale above the one million dollar mark for this year. That’s twice the number that traded last year, and an annual record for this price category in Saskatoon, inching out 2013 which saw 13 sales with a price at one million dollars or more. Clearly, there’s some big money around. Even so, the lower end of the market was quite active this past week, given the overall weakness in the sales market, and the weekly median price fell by close to five thousand dollars to hit $312,900. The four-week median slipped about a thousand dollars from the week before to settle at $330,000 to record an annual decline of $18,500. Meanwhile, the six-week average price managed to inch higher to grow by about fifteen hundred dollars from last week as it reached $351,569 and finished just a couple of hundred dollars shy of last year’s number.
While a solid handful of sellers (eight) managed to bag a full list price deal, just one found a buyer willing to pay more than asking price. That one buyer delivered a solid bonus of $16K to wrap up a deal. On the flip side of the table, 38 buyers closed below the asking price to net themselves an average discount of $13,790.
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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