Changing things up...

Hi everyone. Instead of the stats, I'm going to be posting some things you normally don't see here. I'm out of town for a couple weeks, taking some time to recharge with the family. We are down in San Diego, much warmer than what we left in Edmonton (-23 degrees C). Although the weather here has been wet and cold for San Diego standards, not really sitting by the pool weather. We ended up getting soaked yesterday going shopping at the mall. The open air mall layout in Southern California doesn't work too well in a downpour. Anybody have any ideas on what to check out while we are down here? Any good restaurants or must see places?

November Market update

Well December is here already. It has been a wild year for Edmonton real estate. We have seen a peak of listing inventory never seen before. Our sales have been strong for much of the year. Although November has cooled off. We are now at 8015 homes for sale, and we had 891 sales in November. To give you some perspective, normally we see 1200 homes selling in November, so the sales are off by roughly 25%. Inventory has continued to fall, this is good. I heard a rumour that Calgary's inventory was rising this fall. So, the drop in listings pattern has continued. We should see an inventory level in the 7000 range by the end of the year. The one difference I think we will see in 2009 is not as much of a run up in inventory in the first 5 months of the year. The reason I'm saying this, is that many people last fall (2007), were taking their homes off the market in order to relist in the spring of 2008. They thought the market would be stronger in the spring of 2008. It turned out that the sales were strong, but there were too many other sellers thinking along the same lines and we were flooded with new listings this spring. Happy holidays!