[img_assist|nid=4757|title=August 2007 Closed Sales|desc=This doesn’t look as bad to me as I expected. With apologies to Artifact, I’ve tried my hand at graphing these data out. I know this is a dangerous forum to ask this, and I certainly WANT house prices to dramatically drop for my family’s sake, but is anybody else concerned that it doesn’t look worse? Through August, it looks like total closed sales are down 11%… or, looking at it another way, sales are still at almost 90% of last year’s, even in this “terrible market!” What’s the missing piece here? I want to believe….|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=297]

[img_assist|nid=4758|title=Closed Sales + 2005|desc=I added the 2005 data, which helps to put it in perspective. I am still surprised that there’s a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media this year, with sales pretty much equivalent to last year’s, and almost nothing last year when sales were dramatically down from 2005.

It is interesting that the lowest months (Jan and Feb) are pretty similar for all three years, with reductions in bounces for 2006 and 2007. Perhaps 2000 or so sales is the baseline minimum?|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=297]

“Keep in mind that Sept will be the month that shows the full shock of the credit event in Aug.”

LA_Renter… perhaps, but I think that the seasonal decline associated with Sept/Oct/Nov may mask that effect somewhat. It may be difficult to discern that effect. Also I believe that the credit crunch will ebb and flow. We saw a very harsh contraction and now we are seeing things ease up a little bit (much to the chagrin of many posters here). Everyone was all whipped up about it and we saw tons of posts yet I have only seen one post recently by carlover about the fact that it actually has lessened to some extent. I believe we will have a credit market that is tighter then it has been, yet it will oscillate between being very very harsh and just kind of harsh over the next few years. Especially if a recession does kick in.

I think that maybe September will show the full shock but I think that we will see seasonally low numbers because fall is always soft….yeah they may be adjusted somewhat due to the secular downtrend/credit crunch etc…I am just hopeful that the sales volume come spring of 08 will still continue to be below spring of 07.

My read is that at some point the sales volumes will flatten out and not decline anymore. At that point I am hopeful that the median starts to fall some. This of course is a long term projection over the next few years.

SD Realtor

“In addition to sales numbers that are not dropping off a cliff. We have stabilized yoy inventory numbers as well for about 2 months running.”

Sales are below 2006. Inventory is about the same. Therefore Months of inventory has increased. This is the key barometer for prices.

What’s the opposite of looking for a silver lining? I guess whatever it is it what we piggington’s will do with these numbers.
Here’s my attempt: just taking the average price for the July and Aug. closings (# of closing/value of closed sales), Aug. appears to have come in 3% lower average price than July.
A 3% price drop in a single month is a big deal.
I suspect lots of buyers saw listing prices being cut and thought they would get a “good” deal.
Still, its hard to believe there are the same number of buyers out there with the demise of subprime and higher priced jumbos.

from DataQuick

Aug 06 Aug 07 chng med 06 med 07
San Diego 3,853 3,104 -19.4% $495,000 $475,000 -4.0%

http://www.dqnews.com/RRSCA0907.shtm

Looks like a 19% drop from last year which was really really bad. The median is actually showing erosion