September '08 Stats

Posted on Oct 10, 2008 by Cari McGee in Tri-Cities Market

This month we’re going to take a glance at the upper-end market.  I was perusing the September numbers for homes over $500,000.  A total of three sold, zero went under contract, and there were 139 listings available.  For the Tri-Cities, that seemed like an incredible amount of upper-end possibilities!

I did some more research, and found that 55 of those are part of a condo development which is not slated to be finished until 2010.  They’re units in a group of high-rise towers on the banks of the Columbia.  So, I removed them from consideration, as they won’t even factor into the market for another eighteen months.

The absorption rate is the time, expressed in months, it would take for all the houses in a category to sell if they continued to sell at the current rate and no new units came on the market.  We find this number by taking the under contract figures from the last six months and adding them together, then dividing that number by the months considered and then you arrive at the absorption rate.  So, for houses over $500,000, removing the 2010 condos, we have an absorption rate of 25 months!  An absoprtion rate of 1-3 months indicates a seller’s market. 4-6 months is balanced, and 7+ months is a buyer’s market.

So, if you have a really expensive home you are trying to sell in the Tri-Cities, sit tight.  You’ve got a couple years to wait.

Download the full Tri-City Real Estate stats for September, 2008. (657k PDF)