Saskatoon real estate week in review – Sept 7-11 2009

Like a bouncing ball on its way back down Saskatoon real estate activity fell off big following one of our strongest weeks for the year. It was short week, and sales reports almost always drop off after a long weekend but with just fifty-seven house and condo sales reported, this past week is the slowest on record since the week of March 13. Sales tumbled from an incredibly strong one hundred and two last week but still managed to come up even with the same week last yearwhen fifty-seven Saskatoon homes also changed hands. It seems strange to say “we haven’t had such a quiet week since spring,” a time when housing sales should have been brisk. Real estate sales are about as mixed up as the weather has been lately.

An exceptionally slow listing week may indicate that the market didn’t just die, but rather, that people were busy and focused on other things. Just eighty-five new single-family and condominium listings made their way to the Saskatoon MLS service, down from one hundred and twenty last week, and well off of the one hundred and fifty-five properties listed during this week last year.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

Far fewer expired and canceled listings kept the inventory of active residential listings pretty much level through out the week. We finished the week with one thousand and eighty-four homes, up just two from the previous week, but down six hundred and fifty-three units from the same time last year when 1737 residential properties were for sale.

The system registered just twenty canceled and withdrawn listings this week, with about half of those resurfacing nearly immediately with a new listing flag. Forty-five home sellers made a price adjustment. Just thirteen home listings expired after a period of time on the market with no sales agreement in place.

Prices were skewed higher this week by five sales above the $500,000 mark including one Varsity View home that topped one million dollars. The average selling price of a Saskatoon home came in at $301,072, about six thousand dollars higher than last week while the median sale price slid ten thousand from the week before to $265,000. The six-week average increased just slightly on a week-over-week basis to $286,240, lower than last year’s number by roughly twenty-seven hundred dollars while the four-week median sale price slid fifteen hundred dollars from last week to $273,000, just fifteen hundred dollars higher than it was during the same week last year.

Click the image for a larger version of the graph.

The average underbid spiked higher climbing from $11,430 last week to $14,576 this week. That’s about a 4.6% discount, on average, a number which is higher than we’ve seen in awhile. There were a handful of large discount sales that definitely skewed the average higher but buyers did seem to bring more clout to the bargaining table. Overbids completely disappeared with nothing selling over list price.

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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Vidorra