“Slightly” struck me as a bit of an understatement as well.

Nice to hear from you. I am still doing the daily stats at http://www.twitter.com/norm_fisher

I was having some loading issues with my site last week and I removed some things trying to get to the bottom of it. One of them was the twitter widget I had in the sidebar. I’m looking for another one now.

“What, you didn’t think that the “Dollar volume is expected to increase significantly as the year 2010 progresses.” comment was handwaving and obfuscation?”

Lol, I thought it was clearly a poorly constructed sentence.

“If I were going to nail them for spinning, I would have gone after the “soften slightly” remark.”
What, you didn’t think that the “Dollar volume is expected to increase significantly as the year 2010 progresses.” comment was handwaving and obfuscation?

I agree with you, though; off by 1/6 is not ’slightly’ — especially when it’s the second straight YOY decline. This is shown even more starkly when looking at the fact sheet you posted and compare those same numbers to 2008 and the picture looks even worse.

Dollar Volume, areas 1-5, 2008 to 2010: -38%
Unit sales, area 1-5, 2008 to 2010: -40%

Dollar volume, areas 6-9, 2008-2010: -36%
Unit sales, areas 6-9, 2008-2010: -33%
(In other words, total sales in 6-9 are off almost exactly as much as Saskatoon proper… over the last two years.)

Yes, I know that Jan 2008 was a banner year for sales and all that, but if you look back at the SRAR release for Jan 2008 (http://www.srar.ca/docs/January%202008%20Media%20Release.doc) there didn’t seem to be any mention of how aberrant the month was… just phrases like ‘full swing’, ’strong spring market’ and ‘great market activity’.

As always, thanks for the facts, Norm.

I can see why you’re confused. The chart that you linked is not very well done. For reasons that are beyond my scope of understanding the unit sales and listing numbers represent “total MLS” but they are showing the “average residential price” with those stats. This is stupid because “total MLS sales” would include commercial transactions and farms, so I would have expected to see the “total mls average price” here, except that this number would be completely useless to everyone. Anyway, that’s why you’re not able to get any of the numbers to jive.

SRAR’s Residential stats are here.

Here is a copy of SRAR’s official fact sheet as received in my inbox yesterday afternoon. It is a little more clear in breaking out the various categories.

Just a point of fact: – SRAR’s month end report is always strictly residential and they always separate area’s 1-5 from 6-9. They have been completely consistent in the numbers they are reporting.

If I were going to nail them for spinning, I would have gone after the “soften slightly” remark. Residential units fall 16% and residential dollar volume falls 18%. “Slightly” seems like a bit of a stretch to me, at least slightly.

Realy? With eleven months to go in the year, they expect dollar volume (that is to say, the accumulated total of all houses sold to date) to increase significantly?!? Gawrsh… whod’a thunkit?

“Saskatoon REALTORS® assisted 179 homebuyers with the purchase of a home. This number was down 16% from January 2009 when 212 homes exchanged hands. The average residential selling price was $270,191.00 down 3% from January 2009 having an average residential selling price of $ 278,939.00.”

I’m looking at the SRAR’s own statistics page (http://www.srar.ca/Srarstats.php3) and these numbers don’t match. Even if you add back in the ‘areas surrounding Saskatoon’ (which seem to have been broken out for the sole purpose of having at least one piece of positive news to report) it still doesn’t add up.

There’s some small discrepancies in the # of units sold (179+34 = 213, web page shows 226 sales) but the biggest thing that I see is YOY dollar value change. The SRAR web page says that the YOY -22%, but the press report says -18%… and that’s after you take out a number (surrounding area dollar volume) that’s
+23% from last year. Shouldn’t that make the overall difference more than -22% and not less?

I know not everyone has the same intuitive grasp of numbers that I do, but something doesn’t seem right there. Or possibly there’s something I’m missing. Norm, can you help me figure out which it might be, please?

Even more significant was the lack of sales in the $500K+ range which fell to just three properties in January 2010, down from fifteen in December 2009 and off from nine in January 2009.