More on February sales

In the Edmonton Journal there was an article discussing the sales increase in February.

Alberta house sales buck national slide
Resales up 1.6 per cent provincially, versus 1.5-per-cent decline Canada-wide

The reference here is to seasonally adjusted gain from January to February. As I pointed out in this previous post the sharp slowdown in January on a seasonally adjusted basis contributed to elevated February comparison. Even with this increase factored in home sales in Calgary and Edmonton are still relatively slow.

It appears for March the rate of sales will still be low historically. From Mike Fotiou's stats the first 17 days of March had 705 SFH and 308 condo sales. Extrapolating this to the end of the month gives an estimated 1285 SFH and 561 condo sales. This will be above the rate of sales during the financial crisis but below 2008 and well below boom years.

Bob Truman has also commented on sales for the beginning of March. SFH sales are below the 9 year average, while listings are above.

Stats to Obsess Over

For the period Mar 1 - 12, 2010:

	SFH
	Sales	New listings
2010	517	1318
2009	396	931
Historic Avg(9 yrs)	595	1008
2010 compared to historic avg	-13%	+31%

The Edmonton Real Estate Blog reported some dismal sales and listings numbers last week (emphasis mine). They should report this weeks numbers today on their blog.

Here is our update on the Edmonton real estate market. (Previous week's numbers are in brackets). For the past 7 days:

New listings: 580 (541, 477, 420)
# Sales: 220 (264, 255, 231)
Ratio: 38% (49%, 53%, 55%)
# Price changes: 189 (194, 159, 152)
# Expired/Off Market Listings: 91 (196, 66, 78)
Net loss/gain in listings this week: 269 (81, 156, 111)
Active listings for single family homes: 1947 (1794, 1731, 1641)
Active listings for condos: 1559 (1440, 1391, 1366)