So, How’s The Market?

Fa-la-la-la-laaaa! It’s Holiday time again!! That means crickets all around. Last night I was at 1 of 4 Holiday parties this week (popular, I know) with some other real estate agents from around the DC Metro area. When asked “are you busy?” most of them replied “not at all…but I was so busy this year, and it’s the Holiday time so i’m not surprised.” Neither am I. The time between Thanksgiving and New Years is historically a quiet time around time for moves. People are traveling, hosting family, and on budgets for gift giving, so it’s really no wonder not a lot happens this time of year. As always, my geeky side comes in to reinforce what’s going on, here are the number of CONTRACTS written during the weeks before Thanksgiving through Mid-January (just the date things are under contract):

Date                     2009       2010
11/16 – 11/22        70           58
11/23-11/30          49            47 <—- DROP
12/1-12/8              41            49
12/9-12/15            35           TBD
12/16-12/22          32           TBD
12/23-12/31          26           TBD
1/1 – 1/7              26           TBD
1/8 – 1/14            40            TBD <— PICK UP

As you can see, the week of Thanksgiving usually there’s a significant dip in contracts and it continues to drop until the wheels start cranking as we gear up for the Spring market in Mid January. This is pretty typical from year to year. The real estate “busy season” is usually March-June, if you remember my post on real estate seasons.

As of this morning, there are 621 active properties for sale in Arlington and 322 pending/under contract. I suspect that number won’t increase dramatically in the next 3 weeks, but expect to see those numbers change as we enter 2011.

Keep an eye out for my 2011 predictions coming soon! You can see what my predictions were for 2010 back at this time last year (4 out of 5 isn’t too bad….I didn’t expect interest rates to fall quite as low as they did – a nice reason to be wrong :)).