Anemic Sales

Sales volume is way down.

June sales in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 were more than twice what they are were this past June. 2008 was a weak year. 2009 is dramatically weaker than 2008.

Volume will not return until prices drop.

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About the data:

A good friend and regular commentator in the CHBB forums, Kral, spent an evening with me and created a fantastic set of python scripts to crawl the Orange County land records web server. We now have all 110K transactions for Chapel Hill properties that are digitized on their server. Some records date back to 1952, but I'm skeptical that the county has digitized every transaction since then.

The records seem complete from 1990 on.

I have filtered this data to exclude transactions where:

1) the last name of the seller and buyer are the same
2) the number of logged tax stamps is 0 (the property changes hands without any money changing hands)
3) the buyer is an "llc" or an "inc" or a "realty" or an "etal"

I then look for months with huge outliers in the number of sales. I've added extra filters for "82 magnolia chape"l, which bought 245 units back in June of 2007, one for "brookstone drive" which bought 226 units in an apartment complex on Homestead Rd back in June of 2005, one for "g&i vi ramsgate lp" which bought 189 units on 54 back in March 2008, and one for "mustard seed chambers" which bought 102 units on Westbrook drive in September of 2006.

I don't put much faith in the July 2009 transaction count, since I believe there to be substantial lag between the time a sale closes and when it registers in the Orange County website. Kral and I will run the crawler again next month and see if anything changes for either June or July 2009 sales.

Isn't it refreshing to see these plots? Don't you hate the way the NAR (the National Association of Realtors) keeps all their data to themselves?

The claim "Real-Estate was hot in June" can be "true" in that there were more transactions in June 2009 than there were May 2009. But you can see from this histogram that sales in June are always greater than those in May. And you can also see that sales in June are off 50% from their bubble-year highs.

The NAR is all about misleading buyers into believing that now is the time to buy. A broken clock is right twice a day.