Saskatoon real estate week in review: January 25-29 2010
Following a few weeks of sales that were softer than expected and listing activity that appeared to be escalating both of those short-term trends reversed directions.
Saskatoon real estate agents reported a total of sixty-three single-family home and condominium sales to the local MLS system, an increase of eighteen properties over last week and a gain of seventeen when compared to the same week last year. Each of the previous few weeks recorded year-over-year declines in unit sales for the Saskatoon area.
New listings in the same categories plummeted dropping by more than half of the previous week’s volume to finish roughly thirty percent behind the same week in 2009 as just fifty-eight homes were offered for sale.
After three consecutive weeks of gains that saw total active residential listings climb by about one hundred and thirty properties, inventory levels softened slightly and slipped to 734 homes. That number is down from 751 last week, and well off of the 1,134 homes available at this time last year, but still more than double the number of homes for sale at this time in 2008 when levels reached historical lows for the month of January. There are currently 412 single-family homes for sale and 281 condos, down from 416 and 290 respectively at the close of the previous week.
In single-family homes, inventory remains tightest in the $200,000-$300,000 range where you’ll find a total of eighty-six houses showing a for sale sign. With January sales at forty-six units, there’s a little less than a two-month supply. Conversely, house buyers have some serious options above the $400,000 mark with just nineteen sales in January and 180 properties available.
In Saskatoon condominiums, you’ll see similar supply trends in the same price ranges. Between 200K and 300K, we see twenty-seven January sales compared to eighty-one active listings. Above $400,000 there is a selection of forty-three units but not single sale recorded during the month of January.
Just seven MLS® listings were cancelled or withdrawn from the multiple listing service this week and not one of them returned disguised as a new listing. An additional sixteen home sellers adjusted their asking price, with all but three moving lower.
After reaching their lowest point in nearly a year average sale prices continued to push up for the second consecutive week reaching levels more typical of the Q3/2009 action. In spite of the upward direction that the average took the year-over-year gains that we’ve been seeing over the past seven weeks vanished. The average sale prices for Saskatoon houses and condos hit $290,133 this week, a gain of nearly $20,000 over the previous week but pretty much level with the same week in 2009. The six-week average managed to slip about a thousand dollars on a week-over-week basis but remained about two thousand dollars higher than it was last year at this time. The four-week median climbed two thousand dollars from last week but finished lower than the same week last year by six thousand dollars.
Click the image for a larger version of the graph.
The average underbid jumped back from the low $7,341 of last week to $11,280. Buyers who managed to negotiate a discount off of the asking price saw an average price drop of 3.6%, up from the unusually low 2.4% recorded last week.
Four sellers managed to wrap up a deal above the asking price with the average sale recorded at $3,550 above list.
Highlights from the news this week
An interest rate hike this summer?
Canada home prices rise for seventh consecutive month
How much do your neighbours owe on their mortgage?
Real estate sales likely to moderate (BC)
Saskatoon housing “seriously unaffordable”
Saskatchewan forecast to lead nation in growth
Job prospects remain positive (Saskatoon and Regina)
A map displaying the boundaries of Saskatoon real estate areas is here.
An overview of data collection and calculation practices for our statistical reports is here.
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.
Our Saskatoon home search tool offers MLS listings represented by all real estate brands, presented with more detail than you’ll find anywhere else. Check it out here.
Norm Fisher
Royal LePage Saskatoon Real Estate
There's 7 Comments So Far
January 31st, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Pretty incredible sales numbers given the weather we had last week. I thought with the snowstorm sales would be down significantly.
February 1st, 2010 at 7:09 am
Hey Peter,
Interesting point. There is some lag time between an offer being written and a sale becoming final, making it into these reports. Most of the sales reported this week likely started during the previous week. Any blips from the bad weather are more likely to show up in this week’s numbers.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Regarding “saskatoon housing ’seriously unaffordable’”. Using the median does not seem to me to be a very reliable or usefull way to measure afforability.
The centre’s affordability index is calculated by taking the median house price — the exact mid-point between the highest priced and lowest priced house sold in the third quarter — and dividing it by media annual gross income.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:50 pm
“Using the median does not seem to me to be a very reliable or usefull way to measure affordability.”
Why not? Affordability is all about income vs. housing costs.
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Because it’s too random. If someone happens to sell a 3 million dollar house in the third quarter suddenly Saskatoon is unafforable with a median house price of over 1.5 million when just as easily the highest selling house could have been one million in those three months, and now the median is just over 500,000.
I think you may have mentioned in the past that even ave. house price can be misleading. Wouldn’t ave price per square foot the most accurate way to get a quick snapshot of a market?
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Hi Jeremy,
I see where you’re coming from.
Medians are different than averages and are not typically skewed so severely by a couple of sales at the high or low end. The “median” is the price point at which half of all sales occur above and half of all sales occur below. If you’re working with a group of unit sales (say 999 units) the median value is found in the 500th sale if they were ordered from least expensive to most expensive. Throw in a 1,000,000 sale at the top, or a 10,000,000 sale at the top and it only has the effect of making the median the 501st sale. Either sale, even though one is nine million higher than the other, have the same impact on the median (probably not much). This is a bit of a challenge to explain. Hopefully it’s not murder to understand.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Ah, gotcha, I should have remembered that from high school math. That makes more sense.