The summer is turning out to be a good time to buy. Unlike the late spring, sellers are a little more realistic about prices. However, we expect activity to pick up in September, as people come back from vacation and begin listing their homes in larger numbers.

I’m going to shamelessly lift some comments now from Mike Orr of the Cromford Report about Listing Success Rates, because its a good way to think about what is selling out there right now:

“One of the statistics listing agents like use to set seller expectations is the Days on Market for sold listings.  They use it as a guide to show a homeowner how long they should expect to wait for their property to sell.  The downfall of this measurement is that a property could come on the market at the beginning of a seasonal slowdown (like July or August) and all of the sold DOMs would be recorded during the busy Spring and early Summer months.  Obviously during those months the DOM may be shorter due to the heightened buyer activity that occurs every year at that time, so DOM is not necessarily a good indicator for future marketing times in this instance.  Conversely, if a property is being listed in January, all of the DOM measurements would be for the slow Fall and Winter.  So therefore, not a good indicator for future marketing times during the busy Spring season. 

An alternative measurement to consider is the Listing Success Rate.    This measures the number of properties that sell during the month vs. cancel or expire.  It can be measured by city, price range, dwelling type and transaction type.  The chart below tells us that in the month of July, of all the properties that came off of Active status 79% closed escrow while 21% cancelled or expired.  This is a high success rate, in a normal market it falls between 60%-70%.  It is also a significant improvement from May of 2011 where 36% of all properties that came off the market cancelled or expired vs. selling.”

In short, if you are listing over the summer, expect to be on the market longer, but know that your success rate is still, in historic terms, probably going to be relatively high. See below

If you are starting to look or list, call me at 602-456-9388 if you want more insight and information.