19,000 sales? Unlikely.

From the June 2010 Realtors Association of Edmonton market report

“It has been quiet on the news front but very busy in REALTORS® offices as they list client’s properties for sale, book showings for buyers and attend open houses. This has not resulted in immediate sales, however, and, in anticipation that this slowdown will continue through the year, we have reduced our 2010 sales forecast by 2,000 units from 21,000 to just 19,000.”
...
“External influences pulled sales activity into the first four months of the year which reduced the demand in May and June. Overall there were 680 less residential sales in the first half of the year as compared to 2009,” said Westergard.

They have reduced their forecast to 19,000 based on how close we are to last year's sales. However last year started off in the middle of the financial crisis and sales continually increased from very low levels. 2010 has been the opposite of this. To show how unlikely this is see the level of sales that would be required for the rest of the year in the trend below (at a constant seasonally adjusted rate). Sales have to make an immediate and abrupt jump this month to a much higher rate and maintain that level going forward.


Looking at the trend I guess the year end total will be closer to 16,500 assuming a minor recovery in sales (shown below).

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)

Edmonton: Seasonally adjusted sales/listings and 2010 benchmarks

Official numbers of Edmonton were released today by the REALTORS Association of Edmonton. I made up some historical charts, seasonally adjusted charts and benchmarks similar to what was done for Calgary in this post.

The first chart is non adjusted historical data. These charts are similar to Calgary except it looks like listings in Edmonton have been even more volatile. See the listings in red went ballistic half way through 2007 and have come back close to normal since.


The yearly pattern is fairly clear in the above chart and using the same method as the previous post I created charts that have been seasonally adjusted. See how new listings peaked in the second half of 2007 and have come down ever since. This may have recently bottomed similar to the trend in Calgary where the six month average has formed a bottom. The 2010 benchmarks I use are marked points on the six month average.

Seasonally adjusted sales charts are shown below. The bottom on the 6 month average represents sales during the financial crisis between October 2008 and March 2009 or "scorched earth". The most recent 6 months is called "it's all good" and the time period between October 2006 and March 2007 is the peak of the boom.


These benchmarks are shown as dashed lines in the charts below. We will see how 2010 progress by updating the actual values in these charts. The adjusted sales/list ratio over the last 6 months in Edmonton has been 70% and 69.5% in Calgary. So for a balanced or declining market sales will need to drop below and listings above the green benchmarks.


Next I will post seasonally adjusted sales/listing ratio but that is enough charts for today.