Wasilla, Palmer, Mat-Su Stats for March 12- March19, 2007

MartyFor Buyers, Monday Market Memo

Here are the statistics from the MLS system for this week.  As you can see, things are cooking right along.  There is a slight increase in the amount of pendings and closings.

The one thing to notice this week is that days on the market is going down.  That would indicate a more active market.  It can also be the result of people giving up after trying for many months to sell.

They have either left the market entirely or re-listed their home with someone else.  Hopefully if they re-listed it is for a lower price.  It is mainly the price that sells a home.  You can market and stage your house all you want, but if the price is to high, it won’t sell.

     Average Price  DOM
 New 48 $290,665   
 Total Active  762 $299,805  108
 Pending  21 $234,048 80
 Closed  22 $201,864  78

I use both the Anchorage and Valley MLS systems to do this analysis.  I notice quite a disparity among the two.  For example, this week there were 48 new listings in the Valley MLS and only 38 new listings in Anchorage. 

When I compared to determine which listings the Anchorage system was missing I  was startled by the fact that both were quite different.  There were actually 22 listings that were either not in the Anchorage system or the Valley system.   The Valley was missing 6 of Anchorage’s and Anchorage was missing 16 of the Valley’s.

This is caused by two problems

  • 1. Many Anchorage members are not members of the valley and vice-versa.  So their listings only appear on their own MLS system.
  • 2. Many Realtors are just not keeping up with their listings.  They may have it on one and not the other.

Bottom line: Buyers should use both the Valley MLS system and the Anchorage MLS system to search for homes.  If they don’t, they aren’t getting the whole story.

Any thoughts?  Make a comment.