Holy crap it’s cold out there! As our friend from Yellowknife just said "it’s so cold I saw a lawyer walking down the street with his hands in his own pockets!" Lol…no offense to our lawyer friends 
Seriously though, weather does have an impact on the real estate market. I mean, who wants to go out and look at houses when it’s -40? Only the very, very serious buyer…. Sheldon was out showing houses all week (lucky guy!) and we tried to get photo evidence to prove it but the camera shutter froze shut!
So here is our update, hopefully I got it right on the first try last week. Thanks to Linnaeus for pointing out my error(s) last week. (Last week’s numbers are in brackets). For the past 7 days:
# New listings: 499 (570)
# Sales: 249 (250)
Ratio: 50% (44%)
# Price changes: 231 (285)
# Expired Listings: 414 (115)
# Canceled, withdrawn and terminated listings: 37 (36)
Net loss/gain in listings this week: -201 (169)
Active listings for single family homes: 2592 (2725)
Active listings for condos: 1961 (2010)
So, since the beginning of the month, inventory has only climbed about 300 listings in Edmonton, we’ll see what the stats say for the entire region next week.
There was some discussion last week about whether the average prices in Edmonton will rise or drop this month, Bob Trueman has already posted his analysis (we wait to get the official stats from the board). It shows the average price in Edmonton has dropped by .55% from December and the median by .8%. Last week many people wondered part of the reason the average is holding strong is that the crap properties aren’t selling, and neither are the over priced ones. Well, here is an analysis I did for a property we just listed, as you can see the overpriced properties are expiring, and the competitively priced properties are selling:
If I were one of those 2 blue dots way at the top…I’d be re-thinking my pricing strategy awfully quickly because I’m about to become one of those green dots!
Update: Some commenters wanted to know what the above "scattergram" would look like if I added Comfree sellers to it. Since I can’t post images to the comments I’m posting it here:
Many people have commented on the blog that the Comfree asking prices tend to be way higher than those on MLS, and in this case it appears to be true. Out of all the comparable homes I found on Comfree (comparable to the original home I created this chart for) there was only one sale, and the asking price was significantly less than the comparable MLS homes (I don’t know what it sold for). Interestingly there was also only one home that had snow in the pictures, so they’ve been for sale for a long time. Lastly, there was one home that was comparable that I didn’t even include in the scattergram since was WAY off the scale at $799900 and was throwing the whole chart out of whack.
