Homes Seem to be Selling in My Area of Atlanta

I hear a lot of doom and gloom about the real estate market. I like to be up to date on the general market conditions. I read the monthly numbers that are put out by the MLS and I read all the national updates by the NAR. The FMLS numbers for April said that sales were down by 15% over the previous year. That sounded pretty bad to me. Many buyers are hearing the same thing and are expecting to find bargains out there.

I've been working with a few buyers in the East Cobb area and we have found it difficult to find a suitable home. When making appointments to show homes, there always seems to be a few that have just gone under contract. There also doesn't seem to be many homes coming on to the market lately.

I did some number crunching with a few MLS searches in the areas that I do business in, most of the north Atlanta area. I looked at the number of active listings vs. the number that are currently pending sale or the number that were sold in May.

Overall, the numbers look pretty good. There are around 9000 active listings. Around 3000 are pending sale or have sold in the month of May. That seems like a lot of sales to me. I haven't ever done this before so I really don't have anything to compare it to. But I did see some agents in some out of state markets say that they have been seeing only 1 or 2% of the active listings actually selling in the last month.

I'm just glad that things are selling around my part of the world. I'm hoping that the slow down in other areas and rising interest rates don't hurt us in the future.