A reader of mine, “Sippn”, recently asked me about the number of pending sales and what that’s telling us about the market, and expressed some optimism about the way things are going. I mentioned that I’d get back to him if I looked into the numbers, but the truth is, I don’t usually report anything on the pending sales numbers. The reason is that I can’t go back and compare it to last year, and my market update writing formula is to pick an area and compare last month’s sales to the sales a year ago last month .

Sure, I do write other things here, and try to do so early and often, but market updates are a kind of staple that I go back to often — a kind of rice under the vegetables, if you will.

Fortunately, the National Association of Realtors® pays more attention to the pending sales numbers than I do, and in one of their recent news releases, they seemed to share Sippn’s optimism, citing the biggest monthly gain in the pending sales index since March of 2004 in December. (See, they have a pending sales index, even. I told you they were paying attention).

I don’t usually say this because it stirs up the bubble bloggers to come by and rebutt me, but this is beginning to look a lot like the market is recovering, or at least, stabilizing at an equilibrium where buyers and sellers can get something done together. I find more evidence in the record-breaking numbers I’ve been seeing for visitors on my web site in January (and so far in February).

I should have a graph of that, shouldn’t I?

OK, here’s one:

Not to put to fine a point on it, here’s the graph for a slightly longer period showing the average daily search numbers for “Sacramento Real Estate” for this site.

Naturally if you’re into graphs you can probably come up with a half dozen ways to read this one. To give the bubblers their due, this does seem to show that February search numbers are leveling off, with visits still spiking from searches done in January. I’ll be interested to see how that plays out. Another thing I read from this is that the actual number of real estate searches is not record-breaking as the number of visitors is, but the spike in activity seems to be happening earlier this year than last. Whether that continues through the end of the year or into 2008 is anyone’s guess, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

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