Tucson Foothills Home Sales

One measure of the health of a real estate market is the % of LIST PRICE received for the homes that have SOLD. A market where homes are selling well below their LIST PRICE indicates a weak or declining market where the expectations of buyers and sellers are out of balance, while a market where homes are selling closer to LIST PRICE indicates a more even-handed market where buyers and sellers are in sync with eachother. Over the last 60 days (11/25/06 - 1/25/07), 93 homes priced from $219,900 to $2,595,000, have SOLD in The Tucson Foothills, and they SOLD for an average of 96.78% of their List Price.
To me that indicates a market that is in pretty good balance, not strongly in favor of either the buyer or the seller. For about 6 months we were seeing a standoff between buyers and sellers, with sellers holding out for their price and buyers refusing to buy. But many of those sellers have since stepped forward and reduced their prices to more realistic levels, and more recently, many of the new listings that have come on the market are also priced more realistically. Those are the homes that are selling, and they're selling for a reasonable % of their LIST PRICE, in some cases for full-price.
Looking at the Average % of List Price received based on the number of days on the market (DOM) for those 93 homes,
34 SOLD within the first 30 DOM, for an average of 98.94% of List Price
14 SOLD between 31 & 60 DOM,  for an average of 95.88% of List Price
15 SOLD between 61 & 90 DOM,  for an average of 94.85% of List Price
17 SOLD between 91 & 120 DOM, for an average of 94.91% of List Price
13 SOLD  at 121 or more DOM,    for an average of 96.15% of List Price
While you would expect that the homes that sold in the shortest time would receive the highest % of their list price - because they are the more attractive, desirable and/or better priced homes on the market - you wouldn't expect that the homes taking the longest time to sell would receive the 2nd highest % of list price. I think there are at least two explanations for that. First, it's likely that many of those homes were overpriced and that the sellers were very slow to reduce the price, and when they finally did reduce the price that they went through 2 or 3 price reductions before getting it to the point of market value. The other possibility, and I've seen it often, is that some of these homes were odd or quirky in some way, and so they didn't have broad appeal. They were homes waiting for that special buyer, but when that buyer came along, it was love at first sight.
This data and the following charts are from the Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service.

% SOLD/# of Days On Market


% of List Price received/# of Days on Market