4^th Issue of February 2009

January ARMLS Reports

Resale Listings

The listing count reported in the January Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS)¹ Reports, which were released on February 18^th, was 53,601—down 191 listings from the December reports.  The listing quantity has now been above 52,000 for 23 months and has not varied more than 5% during that time period. This current level remains substantially above the record level of listings prior to January 2005 which was 30,046 listings in February 2003. 

Resale Sales

ARMLS-reported sales for January dropped 14% from the December sales figure with a decrease of 788. On an annually adjusted basis sales were up 1,829 or almost 63% from January 2008. This is the eighth consecutive month that there has been an increase in sales over the same month in the prior year. January’s sales quantity typically drops a little from December’s, so this month’s change is not out of the ordinary per the normal calendar cycle. In the normal calendar cycle, sales tend to be highest in the summer and then gradually taper off over the next few months before resuming the climb during the first quarter of each year. The winter months are consistently the lowest in sales.

Our sources of data for these displays are the ARMLS reports. In these, there are three months, January – March 2005, for which we have not shown listing data because of apparent discrepancies. Additionally, ARMLS notes that the listing information for March through August 2002 may contain errors, but we have chosen to display this reasonable data above.

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¹ (ARMLS) Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service empasses most of Maricopa and Pinal Counties.

Note: This report was prepared utilizing numbers from an adjusted August 2008 report published by ARMLS after the distribution of the August In-Depth Analysis Newsletter.  In all cases the impact of these adjusted numbers  is less than 1%.