June Home Offer-Signing Customers Drop 3% in New Redfin Real-Time Demand Pulse; August Closings Likely Up Modestly Year Over Year
SEATTLE, July 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Technology-powered real estate broker Redfin today announced that home offers from its customers declined 3% over the last four weeks compared to the four weeks before, while the number of customers seeking to tour homes increased 2% over that same time-frame. Last year at this time, offers declined 8% and tours declined 3%.
Based on this information, Redfin expects U.S. August home sales to increase modestly compared to last year.
Although the number of Redfin customers signing offers declined sharply in mid-June, it recovered in the final week. For the week ending June 30, the number of Redfin customers signing offers to buy homes increased 5% compared to the prior week, and those scheduling tours of homes for sale increased 2%.
The complete Redfin Real-Time Demand Pulse is available at:
This report is the first Redfin Real-Time Demand Pulse, a new monthly analysis of thousands of customers touring homes and signing offers in eighteen markets across the United States. As the only major real estate broker storing data in one location about tours, offers and listing consultations performed by its agents, Redfin can project sales volume for the U.S. without waiting 30 – 45 days for a sale to close, or an additional 15 - 30 days for it to be recorded as a public record.
"Though Redfin has experienced very strong year-over-year growth, we saw home-buyer demand slacken alarmingly since Memorial Day before picking back up at the end of June, and now a surprisingly strong week is shaping up to start July," said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. "The demand among home-buyers touring homes almost always peaks in April, and signed offers usually peak in May, so what we look for in June is simply the size of the drop in early-stage demand, not whether there is a drop."
"This June, the drop was smaller than last year," Kelman continued. "That said, we have seen more home-buyer activity lead to fewer actual closings this year because of the inventory crunch, so any notion of a real-estate bull market is premature: prices have stabilized without creating big gains in sales volume. Tour activity has held up much better than offers, in part because more sellers seem to be coming forward to explore an improving market, so this bodes well for September. It's too early to tell. We think August sales numbers will be affected by the mid-June drop in demand, and will thus increase only modestly."
About Redfin
Redfin (www.redfin.com) is a technology-powered real estate broker that represents people buying and selling homes. Founded and run by technologists, Redfin has a team of experienced, full-service real estate agents who are advocates, not sales-people, earning customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions. Redfin's online tools feature all the broker-listed homes for sale, as well as for-sale-by-owner properties that don't pay brokers a commission. The company serves 19 U.S. markets, and has closed more than $5 billion in home sales. Follow us on blog.redfin.com or @redfin.
SOURCE Redfin
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