A LITTLE BIT SLOWER NOW?
The chart below shows the percentage improvement this year-to-date over last year-to-date for each month of closings (blue line) and pendings or contracts in escrow (green line). As you can see, the level of closings has ended up about where we started in January with most months higher than the beginning and ending points. Pendings, or future closings, were higher every month until trending down at the end of October.
What does this mean?
First, the most important statistic to follow is number of units rather than average or median price. Closings in the chart below seem to show a significant downward movement in October and the pending line shows a very gradual downward slope throughout the year.
This is not due to seasonality since we are comparing same month numbers (September to September, October to October, etc.). Results for 2016 are still ahead of 2015 every month but the trend lines cause us to wonder if our improvement over 2015 is going to lessen or even disappear.
Stay tuned to next month’s Market Report when we will have more data.