Saturday, May 12, 2007

Days on Market

After thinking about this week's screen scrape and the DOM re-set game. I went back to look at the houses pending sale in my search criteria. There seems to be a big divide which gets obscured when you look at averages.

I think DOM includes escrow in most realtor data, however my numbers are from the time a listing showed up in my criteria (either new, or lowered price into our range), to the time it lists as pending in the MetrolistMLS.

To get to the point, there seems to be two basic types of sales occurring. The first group is priced well and tends to go pending in less than 2 weeks (often these are the same places that have piqued my interest). The second group of homes has been sitting for over 2 months. I imagine the sellers have finally clued into the fact that they need to accept a lower offer.

Again, this is a relatively small sample, for Folsom and El Dorado Hills, but it does seem to be fairly consistent with the rest of the Sacramento area market.

3 comments:

AgentBubble said...

In MLS, the DOM statistic counts the days from when the listing is entered to when it goes pending. Once pending, the clock stops. I would agree that there appears to be a wide disparity on DOM. Seems like you see either short DOMs (less than 2 weeks) or very long ones (90+ days). But, with the whole relisting game, even the listings that go pending in two weeks have often times been listed before and are now relists.

Buying Time said...

Thanks for the clarification Agent Bubble!

I had specifically asked a realtor if the DOM included escrow. She said it did! It didn't make much sense to me....but we are new in town, so I figured in CA they might do things a bit differently.

AgentBubble said...

That's pretty funny. One thing I've noticed in real estate is that you can ask 5 different agents the same question, and you'll probably get 5 different answers. Most are afraid of saying "I don't know, but I'll find out" and would rather go out on a limb and hope they are right.

Here's an example:

8933 Dontree Lane in Elk Grove

4/10/07 - Listed in MLS
4/22/07 - Pending Sale
5/8/07 - Fell out of escrow, back on market

Total DOM is 17 in MLS.

A funny story:

The last place we rented was near Elk Grove. When we moved in, there was a previous tenant that had just left. They moved in when the place was new. We moved out after 6 months. Last week, my wife sent me a Craiglist ad saying the property was brand new and available for rent. I called the person at the property mgmt company and asked "Is this property brand new" and she replied "yes." I then asked "So, does that mean there have not been any other tenants living there" and she said "that's what brand new means." I said "That's odd, because we just moved out and we weren't the first tenants to live there" and she said "you must be mistaken" and hung up on me!