Home sales in Saskatoon continued at a sluggish pace picking up just five units over the previous week to finish with forty-five houses and condos firmly sold, a drop of thirty-five percent compared to the same week last year when 69 homes found a sold sign. Unless the coming week produces sales that are double what we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks we appear to be headed for a rather weak January, one which seems oddly out of place given the robust sales of the past two quarters. The five-year average for total residential sales in January is 208 properties. So far this month just 114 sales have been reported.
Once again, new listings recorded strong numbers at one hundred and twenty-three homes, a gain of thirty-six compared to the week before and thirty-seven more than were listed during the same week of 2008.
Total active residential listings moved higher again for the third consecutive week and reached 751 properties, up fifty-six units from the week before, but sharply lower than the 1,192 Saskatoon homes available at the same time last year. This morning, there are 416 single-family homes and 290 condominiums offered for sale on the Saskatoon MLS® system. Those numbers are down from 710 and 406 respectively compared to the same time in 2009.
Sixteen MLS® listings were cancelled or withdrawn from the multiple listing service this week. Nine of those homes quickly re-appeared disguised as a new listing. An additional twenty home sellers adjusted their asking price, all but a few moving lower.
After sliding lower for three consecutive weeks, the return of some upper end buyers moved the average selling price of a Saskatoon home higher to $269,289, nearly twenty thousand dollars higher than it was last week and twelve hundred dollars more than it was during this same week in 2009. The six-week average continued to slide lower and reached $276,660, lower than last week by roughly seven thousand dollars, but ahead of the number recorded during the same week last year by about twenty-six hundred dollars. The four-week median sale price edged forward reaching $257,000, up four-thousand dollars from last week and lower than it was during the same period in 2009 by five thousand dollars.
Click the image for a larger version of the graph.
The average underbid fell back to $7,341, down from $8,997 last week, for an average discount of 2.4 percent of the asking price, a full percentage point lower than it was last week when Saskatoon home buyers managed an average discount of 3.4 percent.
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Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Saskatoon Real Estate
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Just got this from Garth Turner’s blog. It is the affordability report. Saskatoon is on page 42 as being 4.4 times the income.
http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
Thanks cyn_d. A slight improvement from last year, believe it or not. We went from 4.6 to 4.4 times median income, and we went from 27th in Canada to 21st on the national rankings.
What would account for the weak month in Saskatoon? It seems a little out of step with other markets that are having great months this January.
Hey Norm,
Any idea what the normal price-to-income ratios were like before the boom? Seems to me that it would’ve been about 2-2.5 in 2006. I’d be interested to know what it’s been like over the last decade or two.
Malcolm,
I’ve been away for two weeks so I can’t really say. I ran into a fellow agent at the airport yesterday who said, “the market is extremely busy.” He seems to think that there’s a lot going on. We’ll have to see how things shake out by month’s end.
Travis,
The “third annual demographia survey” released in early 2007, and based on data collected in Q3/06 placed Saskatoon amongst the “most affordable” markets in the world with a “median multiplier” of 2.6. This was the first time Saskatoon was evaluated in this particular study and of course, we’ve seen a hefty erosion of affordability in each study since that time, until this year’s which shows a slight improvement.
… Saskatoon is still less affordable than nearby Edmonton, and Ottawa with ultimate job security
I could be wrong but years ago I thought that the whole house prices as an amount times one’s income, being the median income was for ONE income, now at least it’s stated as median HOUSEHOLD income. This is at least an explanation of how things have changed over the years with most families probably going from a 1 income household to a 2 income (plus) household.