This bellweather that sdrealtor tracks is really effective but it becomes even more useful if you take a cumulative look at it. For instance if you track the short sale thread that sdrealtor maintains, another poster artifact as taken the raw data and plots it. If you really want to gain insight into the market then taking all of the weekly data points and plotting them will help you get a visual portrayal of the market in CV that cannot be evaluated looking at single data points.
The active/pending ratio is a statistic that can give you insight into the strength of the submarket at any given time. So if there are 150 active listings and 30 pending in a given month, and then 160 active listings and 20 pendings in a different month, the results are pretty obvious. The active/pending ratio “may help” to filter out seasonal fluctuations that are omnipresent in real estate sales (there are ALWAYS more actives in the spring then in the fall). However does the active/pending ratio change in the spring verses the fall? See what I am saying?
Now as far as distress go, one school of thought is that more desireable areas have less distressed sellers. Personally I think this is true for the most part HOWEVER I think there is a strong variance within desireable areas with regard to distressed sellers. My bias is that newer desireable areas will have more distressed sellers then more established desireable areas. With regards to CV yes your assumption was are distressed properties short sales, REO or NOTs? Yes but they also may consist of people who must move due to divorce, relocation, losing jobs, etc. How can you factor that into the analysis? Well one thing you can do is ask your realtor to look for comments in the active listings such as short, bank owned, REO, etc and come up with a ratio of how many distressed active listings there are verses non distressed. If you do that for a few weeks or months you can see if the ratio starts to swing. It is not alot different then sdrealtors short sale monitor but you would do it for that particular zip code. Then you can see if that zip code is indeed growing in distress ratio.
