It’s hard to believe we are at the end of another year – and what an interesting real estate year it has been!  With the volatility of the market in 2009 I thought it would be helpful to provide our readers with a bit of a review.

The most significant statistic, in my opinion, when considering market conditions, is what portion of the available inventory is selling? The following table shows the percentage of properties sold compared to the available inventory, or the absorbtion rate for single-family homes in Calgary Metro year over year for the month of November for the last three years.

While a 27.22% absorbtion rate is good the best absorbtion rate this year for single family homes was in June when a whopping 32.58% of available properties were sold! The following table shows the absorbtion rate for each month since November of last year.

I’ve always said that Real Estate is not rocket science, just common sense and the basic economics of supply and demand. Looking at the above data it is easy to see that although there were fewer sales in November than there were in August, September and October we actually had a better absorbtion rate in November than in those previous months.

The Total MLS (including Condos and Country Residential) Median Price has shown the following progression:

The Calgary Real Estate Board reports both average and median prices. I prefer to judge market conditions by following median prices because average prices can be distorted by unusually high single sale prices. The median price shows us the “middle” price of all sales during any given month. The lowest median price reported this year was $340,000 which represented the “bottom” of the market. The highest median price reported was $360,000 which was achieved in June and then again in October and November. The difference between the lowest median price and the highest median price in the last year was 5.56%.

In review, although the beginning of 2009 was difficult for anyone involved in the business of Real Estate, both the increase in the median price and the absorbtion rate should provide us with a return to a better market in 2010.

It is important however to consider because less than one third of available homes are selling properties still have to be accurately priced to sell. Buyers do have properties to choose from but because there is no longer super high inventory, not at bottom basement pricing. I will leave it to the economists to make long term predictions, but it looks like we have seen a return to balanced market conditions for the first quarter of 2010.

Hope this helps!

Susanita de Diego