Here are two graphs that show some interesting trends in King County home sales over the past year, from April 2007 through June 2008. It’s also an example of how easy it is for a graph to not tell the whole story.
Both are for King County houses and condos, new and resale. Pink columns show the average days on market. The triangles show the percentage of the original listing price that the home actually sold for.
As you can see, the number of days a home stays on market before selling has increased significantly since summer of 2007, when the Seattle and Eastside housing markets started to shift downward. The percent of asking price received also dropped from 99% to 95%.
Compare that to the graph below, which uses exactly the same data except that it shows cumulative days on market. This includes time on market due to re-lists (I believe it’s a 90 day window before previous listings no longer count), and therefore is a more accurate reflection of the time it took a home to sell.
Both show the same overall trend, but the second graph gives a better representation of the market.
Those are the latest numbers available through Trendgraphix for now. I expect the August closing numbers to reflect a pretty slow July market. That being said, I’ve still seen a few homes go off market in a day or two, but they’ve been priced extremely aggressively in order to sell quickly.
