What is the Market doing? Madison, Wi.

For the last year I have been tracking Actives and pendings, week by week. I learnt the value of doing this at one of our great company trainings.
Did you know you can not look back a year and tell how many homes were on the market, or how many had an offer? The Realtors tool, the Multiple Listing Service MLS, historically only records Sold and Failed to sell homes.

So where do you get this info? You track it yourself.

Why do I do it? I do it because it gives me a very accurate picture of the trends right up to the last time I recorded the numbers. I graph the results. Wow it is powerful. I can tell how many homes are on the market and how many have offers on them. Home Sellers, this is the type of info you need!!
Sales/Inventory Stats: Figures for Madison East and West. Residential Single family, excluding condos.
Madison East: Active homes Jan 7th : 526 Jan 28: 528 Feb 28 : 489 March 12 : 466
Madison East:A/O Pending Jan 7th : 80 Jan 28: 88 Feb 28 : 129 March 12 : 138

From this, I combine the numbers into a ratio. The higher the ratio, the more homes to recent activity.
Madison East:
Ratio Active/Pending Jan 7th :6.0 Jan 28: 5.4 Feb 28 : 3.7 March 12 : 3.37

Is the market improving? Let me know what you think.

This is extremely powerful to predict how a market is shaping up. Especially useful when pricing a home early in a season. I can tell earlier in the season than anyone else, where the market is heading.
Let's try the figures for Madison West, remember, the December # was closer to 10!! I figure the drop was distorted by a lot of expiring listings, but we are still looking at on market inventory.

Madison West: Jan 7th, Jan 28th Feb 28th Mar 12th
Active listings: 712 709 732 751
A/O Pending: 117 153 211 223
Ratio: 6.0 4.54 3.47 3.36
From Feb 06, the Ratio balanced around 4-6 for a good part of the year. However by the end of the year, the rose to around 9. This is basically the equivalent of 9 homes on the market for every one which got sold over the last, say 45 days. An inventory of 14 months? Recent data suggests down to around 4-5 months?

The good news, however is that the new year saw a steep drop in numbers:-
Guy Lofts
Real Estate Guy
http://www.realestateguy@kw.com/