The number of homes that are contracted to sell has been increasing steadily for the past several months, and January was no exception for Maricopa County.
Just two weeks ago, on 2/3/09, Michael Orr at the Cromford Report shared:
Pending sales in ARMLS stand at 7,522 today compared with 5,530 on January 3, 2009. This a monthly gain of 36%. The figure for February 3, 2008 was 4,089, so the annual increase is a very surprising 84%.
Among the major cities, these increases in pending sales are concentrated in West and Southwest Phoenix, Avondale, Glendale, Goodyear, Queen Creek and Surprise where pending sales of foreclosed bank-owned properties are very numerous. However we also see healthy increases in pending sales in Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Peoria, Tempe and the rest of Phoenix.
I just did a quick MLS search this morning and find that pending sales have now increased to 8,977. Since many people prefer to close on their home purchase in the latter half of the month, some of this increase can be attributed to that trend. However, that increase indicates that contracts have been written on AND accepted on more than 120 properties per day in in the past two weeks.
Even more interesting to me is that the trend is definitely continuing. Between February 1st and 14th of 2008, 1078 properties sold. This year in that same time frame, 1,892 properties closed. That’s a 75% increase in sales for the same period last year. It does appear that we are off to the strongest home sales year in the past 4 years.
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Great graph and great news. We are all ever hopeful that the bottom has hit. Time will tell.