I have set some criteria on ziprealty and the new listings have been streaming in periodically. That tells me there’s been a good amount of churn even as the listings declined at the end of the year.
Dont read too much into what happens the first few days of the year. Lots of agents enter expiration dates for listings of 12/31 or 1/1 so a ton of listings fall off the market at teh end of each year. This year about 1000 fell off when we were declining by 500 each of the weeks before. Now that everyone is geting back to work, you will see alot of agents put the listings back on that fell off when they were busy over the holidays.
Right now we are under 15,000 listings. If we hit 20,000 by the end of January I would say that was a very ominous sign. Check the short sale monitor each week as I will provide updates.
It doesn’t matter how many listings there are. Sellers need to wake the hell up and smell the coffee. I hope you are doing your part to bring some reality to these sellers. They need to know that if they sell today for 10% under list that they won’t have to worry about selling six months from now when prices are 20% under list. A responsible real estate agent would get these dreamers to face the realities of the current market so that they don’t end up taking a worse bath further down the line.
Every listing I took in 2006 SOLD! All of them in a very reasonable time frame (an average much less than 90 days)for prices that wouldnt be possible today.That’s also w/o playing any of the games most other realtors (including those on this site play relisting properties every 90 days or so) I’m generally 6 months ahead of the pack so you are preaching to the choir.
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