Our Lake Norman housing market continues to change rapidly.  What was true even a month ago may not be true today.  That said, here is the summary of Lake Norman single family home sales and statistics for this past May.  (The period ending yesterday):

 Active Listings:  Our total number of active listings decreased slightly.  While they are high, considering this is Lake Norman’s peak selling/listing season at a time when we might expect increased inventory, this is a VERY good sign.  I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for Lake Norman’s inventory to drop.

Contingent Sales:  This represents the number of homes that are under contract but are contingent upon the buyers selling their own homes.  In a buyers market, this is not a strong position for a seller as it may take months for the buyer’s property to sell.  This number is double that of last month which in my opinion indicates the more sellers are willing to take a risk in order to sell their homes

Conditional Sales:  At 56, the number of  homes under contract that are in the early stages of negotiations with conditions for loans and inspections is 51% higher than last month.  This is an indicator of future closed sales.  There most certainly has been an increase in showings so we may see some higher closed sales over the next few months.

Pending Sales:  94 pending sales is 12% higher than last month.  These are sales that are just waiting to close which would indicate that our June closings should be higher than this month.  

Closed Sales:  I must admit I was a bit disappointed to see our closed sales at only 67.  Closed sales actually dropped 3% versus last month.  

Summary versus 2008:   Lake Norman home sales volume dropped 26% compared to May 2008.  The average price of the homes sold dropped 21% compared to 2008 and the average days a home was on the market increased 36%.  The most important of these three numbers is the drop in the average price of the homes sold.  Throughout the country it has been the drop in prices that has resulted in an increase in sales.  Bargains are selling and are what will continue to drive our Lake Norman market until consumer confidence returns.

5-Year Comparison of Lake Norman Home Sales By Month 

* Please note that all of my numbers come from the Charlotte Region Multiple Listing Service and will not include sales that took place outside of our MLS.

**While my totals on this chart for 2008 sales is 870, when I search on our MLS for the entire year they give me a slightly higher number of 916 so I will use that as our official number for the sake of this analysis.

Summary:  With 67 closed sales and 1598 active listings in the Lake Norman area, we still have a 23.8-month supply of homes for sale.  While this is substantially better than the last quarter, a balanced housing market should have about 6-8 months of inventory so we still have a long way to go to achieve a solid housing market.  If you look at the chart above it is a bit sobering to realize we sold three times as many homes in May of 2006 as we did this past month! 

For more insight into the Lake Norman real estate market:

 Lake Norman Real Estate:  Why is it so hard to buy a home right now?

Lake Norman Real Estate’s April 2009 Sales Analysis

Lake Norman Real Estate:  The Big Picture

Our Charlotte Regional Multiple Listing Service provides Lake Norman real estate professionals and home buyers and sellers with specific search catagories entitled “waterfront” and “waterview” but it is truly up to the listing agents to properly describe the type of waterfront (wide, main channel or cove) and the type of waterviews the property actually has.

The most common term you will find when looking for Lake Norman waterveiw homes is “seasonal”. So, what are seasonal waterviews?

Here are pictures of the view from my own waterview home taken in Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter:

Spring View

Summer View

Fall View

Winter View

November in Lake Norman is the month when we say goodbye to our recently over-seeded Fescue lawns (which remain green all winter but not nearly as they are in October in the photo above) and forests of tall green trees. This year, thanks to a cold snap with some serious wind and rain we only enjoyed the beautiful fall colors briefly before our trees went bare for the winter.

This November also left us with some serious concerns about the Lake Norman real estate market:

Lake Norman November 2008 Sales Data

Active Listings are almost identical to last month’s 1593 and the average days they have been on the market increased from 157 in October to 165 in November. Based on our rate of home sales that translates to a 34.4 months of supply of Lake Norman homes for sale!

Contingent Sales were down from 16 to 11 since October

Conditional Sales were down from 24 to 22 since October

Pending Sales were UP!!! from 72 to 74 since October…not much be a good thing none the less!

The number of Lake Norman homes that sold/closed in November plummeted to 46 from 84. The average sales price dropped 17% and the number of days on the market increased by 21%

To put this in perspective I would refer you back to my article Lake Norman Real Estate: What do our October 2008 Numbers Tell Us? As part of this analysis I included a 4-year home sales chart by month. Our 46 sales in this past November is the lowest in over 4 years. The next lowest sales in one month was 50 in February of 2008. In November of 2005 we had 145 sales.

Is there any good news? In the past two weeks 23 home sales closed in the Lake Norman market area. If this trend continues December may mirror November rather than drop. Interest rates are hovering around 5.25% and there is even talk of the Feds moving in to bring the mortgage rates down into the 4.5% range in order to jump-start our national home sales. I personally represented out-of-state home buyers in 3 sales in the past month. Two of these were due to their homes selling in Michigan and New York!

As we Realtors always say, the holidays are a time for serious buyers and serious sellers. It will be very interesting to see what unfolds as our nation struggles through this financial crisis. The one thing I am confident about is that long term the Lake Norman real estate market is going to get back on track and will see consistent annual growth. The greater Lake Norman and even Charlotte market is still considered one of THE destinations and areas of future job growth. It’s not a matter of if, it is merely a matter of when!

Over a month ago, on a Monday afternoon, I went to log in to my blog to finish my post on Lake Norman’s October real estate sales when I discovered to my horror that my entire blog was gone. After checking other real estate blogs throughout the country that I knew used the same host/server/designer as I, we all realized the server had crashed and the company was gone! For all intents and purposes almost two years worth of my Lake Norman related real estate and community articles were gone.

That launched a saga filled with more drama than you need to know or I’m sure care about. But, today I am thrilled to be back writing on my blog…with all 243 articles saved and the entire site re-designed and ready for an exciting future. You will notice some missing pictures and a few links that may not function but all of those will be completely fixed in the next several weeks.

So, what did I miss writing about this past month or more?

• One heck of a presidential election
• The amazing ups and downs of the stock market
• The national economic crisis = depression = bailout (s)
• Lake Norman real estate updates and Friday Hotsheets
• The official beginning of the widening of Brawley School Road!
• The opening of our new Bloom Market on Dec. 2nd!
• The Town of Mooresville’s annual Christmas Parade
• Thanksgiving
• The Annual Davidson Christmas which was awesome!
• Most of the best of the Catawba Valley Potter’s kiln sales
• NASCAR’s annual Stocks for Tot’s event in Mooresville
• What I have learned about our local Lake Norman area real estate market while selling several homes and listing several others.

Wow, what a time to be mum! While I won’t go back and talk about events that have long since passed, I will be writing about the November real estate numbers for the greater Lake Norman area and providing insight into the state of our local housing market. I will also catch you up on new businesses that have opened and construction and development news as well.

I would like to extend a huge thank you to marti garaughty of The Art of Marketing You who gathered a team of experts and spent countless days and weeks reconstructing and redesigning my blog. The result is exciting and the future even more so!

Thank you all for your patience and for visiting my site. The RSS Feeds and Subscribe features now function so please sign up and I will do my best to provide you quality news and analysis of my beloved Lake Norman and its housing market.

So, first I did my usual monthly analysis:

Lake Norma Real Estate Market Statistics for October 2008

Briefly, you can see that sales dropped 48% versus October 2007, our months of supply of active listings were down from our high of about 1789, but relatively speaking are the highest yet at 24.1 months due to the drop in the number of home sales. Okay, so our Lake Norman home sales are still trending downward and our inventory is still exceptionally high. Not surprising news to anyone!

Knowing we are going into our slowest time of year, I decided to take a look at the historical data by month since 2004 so we can get a better idea of where we have come from to help us determine where we are and future trends for the Lake Norman residential real estate market. Here is what I found:

Lake Norman Homes Sales by Month; 2004 – 2008

	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004
October	66	98	117	184	129
November		84	88	145	132
December		64	132	134	137
January	69	87	102	105	70
February	50	105	98	88	74
March	71	151	153	136	124
April	90	120	143	152	115
May	90	152	182	157	176
June	82	169	227	172	184
July	101	147	166	191	187
August	74	144	180	233	181
September	69	105	135	163	133
Totals:	813	1492	1743	1860	1642

As you can see, Lake Norman real estate peaked in 2005 and started its downward trend in July of 2006. The most significant decline has been this past year when we have dropped to less than half of the the previous years’ sales each month. Traditionally we would expect to see the usual holiday slowdown with an uptick in sales next March.

Considering the number of active listings we currently have in the Lake Norman real estate market, these next few months are going to be tough even if we meet the sales numbers of last year. I expect to continue to see prices drop until our inventory decreases to about half of what it is today. Whether that is in 6 months or several years is very hard to predict until we get a better handle on the global economic crisis.

FYI, my blog’s server has been down for almost 2 weeks and is still not functioning properly. I apologize for the interruption and can’t wait to get back to writing on a regular basis!