(Is it just me or does that mean we still need to shake out a few more agents despite the losses we have already seen? That's a lot of agents that won't be getting a paycheck this month.)

 

• The gross volume of all properties sold was just over $1.5 billion in December. For the year we did $17.89B
  
• There are 7.7 months of inventory in the NWMLS (32,114 active listings divided by 4157 pended properties in December)
• New construction has 8.6 months of inventory (3764 active listings divided by 455 pended properties)
• I should move to Whatcom County. They have an average of $96,000 pending per agent. King has $58,000. Ferry County has $6250 (Ouch!)
  
• For King County, Single Family Homes and Condos
  • Average asking price was $503,610
  • Average pending price was $387,852
  • Average sold price was $422,008 (it's safe to say the sold price will go down next month since the pending price this month was so much lower)
  • Average new construction list price was $622,225 (Seems to me like they are building way higher than the market will support)

See wasn't that good fun? But there's more. I have talked a bit about how the market has been very inconsistent and made it very difficult to price homes appropriately. I thought I would demonstrate that two ways. The first, I have made a graph of how selling prices have changed from year to year. So, I compared December 2010 with December 2009, November 2010 with November 2009 and so on. Check it out.

You can see that we had some pretty solid down time from the beginning of 2008 to the beginning of 2010. After that it has been all over the place. Some months are up compared to the last month, some months are down. No consistency.

 

For another view, check out the same sales price information but compared from one moth to the previous month. So, in this one I compared December 2010 to November 2010, then November 2010 to October 2010 and so on.

 

This one is even goofier. Some of that is to be expected as this compares different times of the year against each other. But, it's all over the place with no consistency. There's hardly 3 months in a row that moved the same direction.

 

But, there's hope! This is only one piece in pricing a home and there is light at the end of the tunnel.

 

Hope you enjoyed all that romp through my statistical fun.