Real estate stats weak in April

The spring housing market continues to disappoint just about everyone involved in residential real estate. GLVAR turns in its monthly report for April and we see that home listings are up by 4.5% from March, to 22,242. This means that we are slowly approaching last fall's all time high. If we compare year to year figures for April, single-family house sales dropped a chilling 39%. Condo and townhome sales did even worse, down 45%.

If there is a bright spot here, it's the price. Like it has been all along in the past several months. The median price of a single-family house decreased 1.6% from last year. Condominiums and townhouses experienced a slight improvement at 0.5%. We'll take anything.

There simply are too many sellers out there who are still reluctant to embrace the reality of the market and price accordingly in order to get a viable purchase contract. The buyers, on the other hand, are just happy to keep on waiting for a further weakening before making any firm commitments. It already is a buyer's market, but they want it to be an even better buyer's market. Can't disagree with that.