Edgewood, WA Real Estate Blog

We’re at month’s end and after reviewing May’s Edgewood statistics I’ve moved on to home sales in Milton. It’s always much more interesting to look at activity by price range by single area as opposed to overall stats for multiple area groupings the MLS publishes if you want the nitty-gritty on a specific area. Here’s the data for May in NWMLS area 71 which includes Milton, WA.

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As you can see, not a lot of sales or pendings compared to the number of listings. As a rule of thumb, figure the sales went pending 30 to 60 days ago, and the pendings occured in the last 30 days. Pendings are a more immediate reflection of what’s going on although you have to be careful as a given a home could be pending more than one month, whereas a closed only happens once.

There’s not much separating any of the price ranges. The two active listings in the under $200K price range are a “mistake” (probably intentional to get more views) as they are actually condos that should be listed as condos.

The following shows continuous days on market (CDOM). It’s much more representative of the condition of the market than simple days on market. Days on market (DOM) is how many days the home has been on the market under the current listing – but a home could have been listed many times by one or more agents. CDOM only resets to zero when a property has been off the market for at least 90 days.

As you can see, homes in the $300K-349K price range have been sitting a long, long time. They’ve probably been listed and relisted by multiple times by multiple agents.

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Note, however, the CDOM for the 2 homes that sold – only 24 days.

You can just feel the “stickyness” of home prices. Sellers are hanging on to yesterdays prices, and buyers are waiting for them to drop. I usually calculate inventory numbers (how many months of inventory given the current rate of sales assuming no new homes come onto the market). But with no sales in all but one category…

Of course one can consider an overall average for Milton and say there were 55 homes on the market during the period and 2 sold, so the inventory is 55/2 = 27.5 months or just over 2 years. That’s pretty ugly.

But two homes did sell and its not rocket science why. It comes back to whether a seller wants to list their home or sell it.