It is time to update our blog readers with our statistics for the month of May 2009. Sales activity is way up, though it seems concentrated in certain segments of the housing market right now.

Sales Activity Strengthens

Improving on an already strong April, findwell agents were super busy with home tours and placing offers. Spring is a traditionally strong sales season for real estate every year, but we’ve seen some surprising strength in certain segments of the market.

• findwell agents led buyers on tours of 145 homes, a 51% increase from April. Overall, home tours are up 116% from February and March levels.
• fiona, the findwell MINI Cooper, clocked 1323 miles on home tours.
• The number of offers submitted and received by findwell increased 150% over April.
• 38% of offers placed in May were on bank-owned (REO) properties or short sales, an marked increase from April.
• We had two transactions fail in May. The first transaction was a vacant land purchase that didn’t work out when the engineer provided a negative feasibility study report. The second transaction fell apart on a new construction purchase where the builder was more than 6 months behind on their promised completion date.

Sellers Continue to See More Traffic

• findwell sellers averaged 15 showings of their property for May, a 66% increase from April.
• Our agents received direct feedback from 74% of agents who showed our listings.
• For 2009, findwell’s listings have sold for an average of –0.7% off of list price and are currently averaging 54 days on market before accepting an offer.

Some Competition Returns

In an unexpected turn, our buyers got outbid four times this month! Most of the competitive bidding situations seem to be occurring on single-family homes in the <$400k price range. While most of these homes are not being bid up over list price, we had one notable exception on a bank-owned property. The bank priced the home at ~$75k under market value, which resulted in 11 bids in one day. The winning offer was likely +$70k over list price!

Customer Quote of the Month

“Thanks for the great job helping me to buy my first home! I didn’t realize that it was going to be such an adventure to buy a home, but you guys were pros. You kept things on track and got the deal done, even when it didn’t look like it was going to work out. Also, thanks for the extra help during the inspection process. You really went above and beyond my expectations by seeking repair bids and ultimately coordinating a bunch of repairs so that the house was ready for us to move in on the closing date.”

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

We continue to see more and more people engaging with us via social media, such as our blog, Facebook or Twitter. In fact, we got our first customer from Twitter just this month!