Another month gone by...and time to look at the numbers for August 2009 for the Lancaster County Residential Real Estate market. As you know, I'm a charts guy so here are some charts!
Overall, we had a good month! Pendings and Closed home numbers are way up. New listings held steady, which we really needed to keep the supply down as long as possible while sales crawl back up. I'm particularly happy to the see the prices coming down (correcting slowly). After many months of higher average days on market for sold homes, the number came sharply down to 2008 levels. All good!
I tried to highlight the same timeframes for the last 2 years so you can see the curves. For example, last year the sales were already tailing off after peaking in June 2008 (pink line). This year, although far off 2007 levels, the home sales numbers are behaving more "normally". The big question is "what will happen in the fall?" when the bottom fell out last year...
My two little bubbles show my thoughts on the average new listing an ultimate sales prices - the Seasonally-adjusted numbers (12 months rolling average) are both on the decline, in my opinion nicely correcting downwards. Overall, countywide, we've only seen less than 10% average price declines in sold homes.
Let's look to see how September shapes up - I'll be posting that one pretty soon since I'm interested to see what happened!
On another note, Sheriff Sales in Lancaster County are up 20% over 2008 (as of the already-posted November sale). Where will that go?
Jeff, I absolutely love your charts. Very informative. Looks like your market is holding its own right now. Good luck to you!
Thanks Lina - I think we're doing OK...
Jeff, these numbers look pretty good! The prices are not off all that much and the number sold is up. Good combination!