MRIS February 2010 Housing Report

MRIS released its data for February signed sales contracts for existing home and condos in the District a few days ago. We're back to the same old routine: volume up, prices down.

Key points in February's data:

• YoY, aggregate dollar volume increased 28.21% and the number of units sold increased 34.63%, but average sales price fell 4.77%.
  
• Condo dollar volume increased a healthy 23.38%. Home dollar volume was 30.92% higher.
  
• Condo sales volume was up 46%. Home sales volume popped up 27.39%. In other words, home sales have returned to February 2008 levels while condo sales are about half that of the same month.
  
• Condo prices dropped 15.49%, while home prices were up 2.77%.
  

At February's sales rate, there's a 9.25 months supply of condos and 7.05 months supply for houses. While that's a slight uptick for condos [+0.28%] and a tiny decline for homes [-0.6%] when compared to January, that's 60% and 42% higher than December's inventory, which isn't encouraging.

Detailed Data

Average Sales Price

Dollar Volume

Transaction Volume

MRIS February 2010 Sales Report: Preliminary data

Yesterday MRIS released February's data for sales of existing homes in the District today. It looks like the market's softening again and is back to singing that old song: "Turn up the volume, turn down the price". Prices have resumed their downward trend. Key points [YoY]:

• Dollar volume up 28.21%
  
• Average price is down 4.77%, median is down 5.56%
  
• Unit sales volume [aggregate] is up 34.63%
• Home unit sales up 27.39%; 10.5% of homes sold for more than $1MM.
  
• Condo unit sales up a whopping 46% YoY; only 1 condo sold for more than $1MM.
  

Sales prices were 92.67% of list. At February's sales pace, there is a 9.18 month supply of condos and 7.05 month supply of homes listed for sale; both metrics indicating weakening demand.

Analysis forthcoming [I promise!].

S&P/Case-Shiller:December 2009 report

Jeez, has it really been almost two months since I last posted? My apologies, I've had a lot going on.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report for December 2009 was released last week. The report shows "show that the U.S. National Home Price Index fell in the fourth quarter of 2009 but has improved in its annual rate of return, as compared to what was reported in the third quarter [2009]."

“As measured by prices, the housing market is definitely in better shape than it was this time last year, as the pace of deterioration has stabilized for now. However, the rate of improvement seen during the summer of 2009 has not been sustained,” says David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s. “In the most recent months we are seeing fewer and fewer MSAs reporting monthly gains in prices. Only four cities saw month to month improvements in December over November, when you look at the raw data. We are in a seasonally slow period for home prices, however, so it is not surprising to see better statistics in the seasonally-adjusted data, where 14 of the markets and the two monthly composites all rose in December. Similarly, the National Composite fell by 1.1% in the fourth quarter, but rose by 0.3% on a seasonally-adjusted basis.”

For the DC area, sales prices declined 0.21% in December compared to November, but are up 1.41% YoY, the first positive YoY metric since September 2006!

The charts below reflect home price data for the Washington, DC MSA.