Madison Guilford Clinton Killingworth Westbrook Real Estate Inventory Report for Week Ending 9/8/2007

Inventory Report for 9/8/07, Madison Guilford Clinton Killingworth Westbrook Connecticut - Real Estate Market Data

Tom Burland http://www.ct-shore-homes.com/

This is an update to my previous report noting this past week's activity.

This week inventory bounced up a bit from 700 to 718 with an increase in new listings and a weakness in deposit/under-contracts. .

This week new listings jumped to 52 and is most likely due to home owners holding off listing in August and placing them on the market in September anticipating the fall season which is traditionally the second strongest part of the year for home sales. This year we have heard continually that activity has shifted by about a month over traditional patterns. This is evident by looking at closes which if you look at TeamShoreline's blog have traditionally peaked in July, this year August (101) has already outpaced July (89) with the most active week of the month to come. That should mean if New Listings remain low, we should further eat into the Active Inventory. This will signal a return to a normal market. It also appears that the Fed activity over the coming months will be a positive influence on returning the housing market to a "normal" condition.

We need several more weeks of inventory decline before we can really mark a "tipping point", but for those optimists out there, this week's news is good.

New Listings are just that - recently listed properties "new" to the market - in reality some percentage of these are a re-contracting of expired listings.

Deposits show properties under contract that have cleared contingencies - near real time reflection of buyer activity.

Under Contract- are real time reflections of actual transactions, these are contracts written in the past week that have some contingencies involved.

Closed -are properties that have the total transaction completed in the past week, generally these are contracts written 45 to 60 days earlier.

Expireds - are properties that were on the market that didn't sell.

Price Changes - generally in this type of market are properties where list price has been reduced. This usually occurs after a property has been on the market for some time with little traffic and/or no or unacceptable offers.

Now these are general market statistics, in all of these towns there are discrete segments that may be behaving differently. One example of a segment is price range, another is location in town, another is style or number of bedrooms etc. Realtors are equipped to interpret this data for customers to make sure properties are positioned correctly and offers make sense in the current market.