I agree with you, I’d like to see it expand into more Canadian markets. Case-Shiller has been going for 20 years, so we have some catching up to do. I do like the methodology, as the avaerage and the median can so easily be distorted by the mix of homes sold.

Thank you for indulging my inner stats geek.

I’ve seen Teranet before but with just six housing markets tracked it’s hard to spend much time on their site. I can’t find any info about where they obtain their data but I do see that it is associated with the National Bank of Canada so clearly, it’s more than a couple guys in their garage. I wonder if we;ll see it expand across Canada. It would be good to see some arms length reporting on house prices.

I understand how you might feel as a buyer but when sellers are faced with a five-six month supply they need to be realistic. Naturally, I would never get a seller tied up in that kind of a deal unless I thought the odds of a firm sale were greater under that scenario. If I owned a $400,000 home and a buyer with a $250,000 property wanted to buy it, and was willing to price their home appropriately I would give it some serious thought. The odds that you’d later come waltzing in with a full price offer are a little light right now. If you did, we might wrap up a negotiation without you ever knowing that another buyer had an option.

As a buyer I have always told my agent that I am not interested in even looking at houses that have an accepted conditional offer. Why look at something that you may not be able to buy even if you are willing to pay full price? Making an offer to me is a logical business decision but there is also an emotional component as well. I just don’t feel like countering back and forth until we have an acceptable price and then sitting there waiting for 24-48 hours while the other guy makes up his mind whether he will remove the condition or not. Also it is harder to negotiate a good price when the seller already has one offer in place.

Sellers might think that they are hedging their bets but they should be aware that there are many buyers like me. Some buyers will look at the house but not make an offer until the condition has expired. In effect their house is off the market to many buyers. This just happened to a friend of mine. Lots of traffic but the buyers agents said their clients would not make an offer due to the condition.

In one of the Vancouver real estate blogs agents have stated that some MLS descriptions have a clause stating that the seller will not accept “conditional on selling another property offers”.

You could also agree to reduce your own asking price by a set amount on a monthly basis until your house sells; this would be reassuring to your seller, since they’d know you’re serious about selling and moving.

I wouldn’t want my home sitting on the market as a conditional sale (since it would get less action), unles I was virtually certain the sale would go through. Conditional on sale of own home just seems too uncertain.

From a negotiation and bargaining standpoint, expect to pay close to list price for this consideration. The best deals are cash followed by subject to financing.

Thanks.

While it’s entirely possible that you may encounter sellers who are not open to including such a condition, I doubt that this will be a big problem for you. There should be a pretty good chance of selling that condition to most sellers.

Conditional sales that include a “subject to the sale of” condition are rarely reported and almost always still show as “active” on our system. The reason is that an “option clause” form is typically used. That gives the seller the right to continue marketing the property and receiving offers. If they get one they want to accept they are bound to provide the original buyer with notice (period negotiated at time of first offer) to remove all conditions or step aside. You will almost certainly be asked to sign one of those if a seller agrees to your conditional offer.

my family is currently looking into moving from a townhouse into a larger single family home. If and when we decide to put in an offer, how realistic is it that a seller will accept an offer on the condition that we sell our home?

With an increase in supply and some sellers becoming more motivated to move their properties has there been any change in the number of conditional sales being reported?

Any insight is appreciated.

PS really enjoy your weekly updates and monthly reports they have been a great resource for us.

Regarding the repeat sales methodology data- are you all familiar with Teranet? They use the same sort of data, and I believe it’s supplied by the CREA (please correct me if I’m mistaken on this). Unfortunately they don’t appear to have any information available for Saskatchewan. There’s a detailed page about their methodology on their site.

http://www.housepriceindex.ca/

In other news:

Value of building permits drops in Saskatoon

http://tinyurl.com/dgm9nu

“The value of building permits in the Saskatoon region fell by more than 50 per cent between January and February, according to a new Statistics Canada report. Building permits were worth $53.9 million in the Saskatoon CMA (census metropolitan area) in the first month of the year, but fell to $26.2 million in February, a drop of 51.3 per cent. Much of the decrease, according to the report, is due to a drop in residential building permits.”

Thanks for the heads up. I had already had two cups of coffee as well.

I have no doubt that there is sufficient data there, it’s just not accessible to me in a way which would be practical to access. I cam run a search on any address and find all of the MLS history, but obvously it would be pretty time consuming to do this one address at a time. I have a front end software to access the MLS database. While it’s fairly robust, this is not a function that is available. Might be able to get it out in a comma delimited (?) format.

Bookrat, yes, you’re right of course (those $1M sales did skew the numbers higher, just not past ‘average’ like they normally have in the past). It would seem as though there is still a very active (albeit limited) market for $1M+ sales, although I wonder how long this will remain the case. I know of at least one sale in that price range over the past year where the new owners had yet to sell their first home before plunking $1M+ down on the second. I think we still have enough brazen speculators in this market confident that they’ll be able to sell their existing home at any price (some of these have now been on the market for close to a year, though, if not longer).

I should think so! I myself can’t think of a single 10×10 house for sale.

(You might want to proofread that last response – seems to be a few words and zeroes missing.)

“I wish our system was set up to identify properties that had sold more than once in recent years.”

As someone who has done enough database/GUI programming to be credible, I can say that if the data’s not already stored somewhere, then you have little chance of this ever happening… but if it is then it would be relatively simple to make it happen and would simply require a decision to do so (which brings in its own politics). Any idea if it’s there or not, Norm?

@Jason: “I can’t say I recall any time over the past year where a single million dollar sale (let alone 2!) failed to skew the numbers higher.”

Oh, but they *did* skew the numbers ‘higher’ — all the way back to ‘average’. Without those two sales, the average price for the week comes in at $251,655 — almost $22k lower.

But in fairness, the mean and median values for this week are closer together than they were last week, indicating (as Norm already said) that there were a bunch of low-end sales skewing things as well… which is why it was all a wash.

“are we seeing depletion or build-ups of inventory in certain price ranges?”

This is strictly perception but I would say that the “months of supply” increases fairly dramatically as the homes get larger. If you were looking at bungalows under 1000 square feet you’d find a fairly small supply.

“if interest rates were to increase by 1-2 points by next year, how would you see that effecting the market? (do you think this would further reduce the buying pool and soften prices further?)”

Naturally, that would be what you’d expect. I’m just not sure that things are working as we would expect now, or if they will in the future. There seem to be new sets of rules being written daily.

“high number of realtors in Saskatoon; has this number diminished as of late”

Not to any great degree but perhaps they’ve been waiting for spring.

Matthew,

No such thing being done here. It’s a good idea, but it looks like it would be murder collecting the data. I wish our system was set up to identify properties that had sold more than once in recent years.

Do you know if there is enough data for Saskatoon to do a Case-Shiller type of analysis? Does anyone do one for Saskatoon?

Thanks. I’m glad you like it.

Jedi,

“What are your thoughts on doing a piece on becoming a real-estate agent?”

That sounds fascinating. Seriously, it’s probably something I should do as I probably hear that question a dozen times a year. There is a decent explanation of what’s involved on the Association of Saskatchewan Realtors website at http://www.saskatchewanrealestate.com/index.htm

Note the navigation bar on the left hand side of the page, starting with “Become an Agent.”

Jason,

“I still think we’re on-track to break over 2,000 listings this year, and believe that the weather has played a factor in delaying the typical “Spring rush” of new listings this year.”

Looking back over the past five years it appears that it’s more “typical” for that rush of listings to really start flowing in April or May. Even if new listings don’t come on big we are probably looking at inventory in the range of 1500-1800 by the peak, perhaps returning to a more balanced market by next spring.

The fact that a third of all activity was under $200K this week suggests that prices have come down substantially. I think that will become more apparent over the next ninety days.

I still think we’re on-track to break over 2,000 listings this year, and believe that the weather has played a factor in delaying the typical “Spring rush” of new listings this year. If this hasn’t started to materialize by late April or early May, though, I’ll have to concede that we may not see a repeat of 2008 and that both new listings and sales may be fairly flat for the rest of the year.

There are a lot of new economic indicators that we may have quashed deflation at the expense of accelerating inflation, in-turn leading to higher interest rates (perhaps arriving sooner than anticipated). Insomuch as SRAR has indicated “a stable market for the rest of 2009″, I think all bets are off if this happens.

everyone else points out the kinks in Saskatoon’s armour, yet Saskatoon proudly stands a knight wrapped in tin foil with a plastic sword, when real swords are selling for less

What are your thoughts on doing a piece on becoming a real-estate agent? it would be interesting to hear the process you went through, what led you to Royal Lepage, and the positives and negatives on a daily basis for those considering a career in real estate. As always, keep up the great work.

We did the ‘Full Monty’ on the inside, but you could certainly spray-foam the exterior if you’re planning to replace your siding. Be sure to talk to your installer about preparations to prevent any foam from splattering finished surfaces; as promised, it’s very good at filling even the tiniest crevices, which can be a liability if you’re not properly prepared.