ABOR March numbers were released today so David Ivy should be posting them for us here on BP soon. To say I was surprised about the year-over-year sales volume beat is an understatement. After we review the weekly Market Watch numbers, I'll tell you what I think happened.

Residential sales for April 9 to April 16 is down from the first week of April across every metric except one. Withdrawn properties were just ever-so-slightly higher this month. New listings dropped 5%. Pendings dropped 7.5%. Solds fell 14.5%. New temporary off markets (TOMs) fell 22.3% but there is more to the story about our much maligned TOMs.

Check out the aging on our 730 total TOMs listings...

TOMs 0-90 days = 616
TOMs 91-180 days = 59
TOMs 181-270 days = 35
TOMs 271-365 days = 8
TOMs over 365 days days = 6

77.9% of our TOMs listings occured after the February 24th stock market crash. Two days later, California reported the first case of Covid-19 on the US mainland. If it weren't for these TOMs, our market would be rocking a rolling. I've yet to ascertain the motivations for these sellers. Please comment if you've changed a listing to TOM or know the reason someone else has.

Let's look at leases. Most leases terminate at the end of the month so a 17.5% drop in new listings isn't surprising. Neither is the 13.1% drop in signed leases. If anything, I expect leases to perform better than normal after evictions are restarted. The 10.4% increase in pendings is very encouraging. I've also spoken with two different agents listing homes for sale above the $700k level. They both lamented at the drastic increase in leasing inquiries. A lot of people lost their down payments when the market crashed and will be looking to lease rather than buy. Anyone who has read my old posts knows I've been bullish on SFH 4-bedroom rentals for a few months now and this data further supports that position.

Multi-Family. It's tight, hasn't missed a beat, and I wouldn't touch it with 10ft pole right now.

And finally, how did we generate a 2% year-over-year beat on March sales volume? Every reliable indicator showed a 9% to 15% drop on the horizon for March sales. What happened?

Real estate agents happened. Check out the red box. For listing #1, the status was changed on 4/13/20 from Withdrawn to Sold. But check the Stat Date which means the date the change is effective. Listing #1's effective sales date is 7/30/19! I couldn't believe that an agent would take 8.5 months to update a listing in the MLS, but the data on TravisCAD supports this.

Almost 15% of March sales weren't coded as sold by the agents until the middle of the second week of April. There were even 20 February sales coded in the second week of April. Maybe we should call this phenomenon Agent Delayed Data-entry or ADD for all of the agents in need of adderall prescriptions to get their jobs done?

All things considered, inventory is shrinking and so is the number of qualified buyers. If supply and demand decrease at comparable levels, there shouldn't be any huge price swings or market dynamic shifts. If either side of that equation gets cattywampus on us Austin will still be the best place in America to live.

Austin, Texas

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