After many months of an ever increasing gap between the total number of available properties and the the total number of sales there has been a slight narrowing of the gap! Hooray! Or perhaps I should say Yahoo! It is Stampede week after all! Does this mean a return to double digit percentage price increases, multiple offers and a feeding frenzy? Heck no! But this slight change is an early indicator of a return to a more balanced market. How do we know this? Market watchers are probably aware of the monthly statistics published by the Calgary Real Estate Board but many are unaware of the daily statistics posted on www.creb.com. Here you can see the Calgary Metro Area Single Family Statistics which show the total number of available single family homes and the total number of single family homes sold in the last 30 days. Today we have 6,563 available homes. This may seem like a lot but it is down from our high of 7,292 posted on May 30th. The total number of sales are up from 770 posted January 6, 2008 to 1,363 posted today. To put these number is perspective; when we had 770 sales we had 3,480 available listings so 20.11% of the available inventory was sold within the previous 30 days. When we had 7,292 available listings, 1,301 properties had sold the previous 30 days or 17.84% of the available inventory. Today at 6,563 there were 1,363 properties sold in the last 30 days or 20.77% of the total inventory.

Yes, this also means that 79.23% of the available homes have not sold and if you own one of the 79.23% you are still facing a very tough market.

It will also take several months to reach the better balance. Just as it took several months for the market to react when the prices were rising. It was April of 2007 when the inventory began to increase yet the highest average price was recorded in July of 2007.

Those of you who were waiting for the “Bottom” of the market might want to think about jumping in!

Hope this helps…

Susanita de Diego