What Is SF?
I noticed the article in the Statesman this morning wondering about “Have We Hit Bottom?“. The article was looking at something I mentioned a few days ago, the inventory number going down. Here is what the Statesman said this morning
For the first time in 28 months, the number of Treasure Valley homes for sale offered a glimmer of hope for a stalled market.
Ada County homeowners were selling 5,055 homes at the end of July, compared with 5,198 a year ago, according to the Intermountain Multiple Listing Service.
The article goes on to say that this is a first since February of 2006. I would caution that it depends which day of the month you pull your MLS stats because the numbers do fluctuate some, especially around the last day of the month into the first few of a new month. That time usually shows a large number of listings that expire all at once, and then get relisted.
More interesting to me than simply a lower year over year number is the fact that for the first time in a couple of years the inventory has declined in August. The last couple years we’ve seen increasing inventory clear into September. Last September, in fact, we had 4850 active Single Family homes, while this morning we showed 4593. Great movement, and something this market needs. Incidentally, the 5055 number quoted in the article probably includes “Single Family With Acreage”, because I haven’t seen SF only go over 4700 on any day I’ve looked at it this summer.
Which brings me to another point from the Statesman article. Just what is a “single family home”? One of the Realtors quoted in the article made the point that if you could buy it and live in it, it was a single family home. By that definition he maintained that our market is still getting worse, because of the increase in condos and townhomes on the market.
On my blog and in my newsletters I have always counted Single Family homes as just houses… no acreage properties, no mobiles, and no condos or townhomes. My reason? Simply that when a buyer comes into my office and says they would like to find a home to buy, I will ask them “do you want to see condos or townhomes as well as houses?” Most of the time the answer is “No, just houses.” I consider condos and townhomes a segment of the market, and a rather small one at that. Folks who are looking at condos and townhomes are looking at them for specific reasons, but they might be willing to consider a house. I’ve not found it to be the case when folks are looking for “a house” that they’ll also accept a condo or a townhome on their list of properties to go see. So when I look at the market, I look at houses.
Different agents see the market differently. None of us define it the same way. Make sure you know what they’re looking at when you hear someone tell you the market is getting better, or that it is getting worse.
