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One of the most telling metrics on what the real estate market is doing is the "Active/Pending ratio," which can take some effort to grasp, but it's the best metric to understand what's happening now rather than what happened last month.
A property is considered pending between when an offer's been accepted and when it closes. If you want to know your pulse, you don't want to know what it was 30 days ago, you want to know what it is in real-time, and the active/pending ratio is similar.
The higher points on the graph indicate it's taking longer for homes to go pending, and lower indicates homes are quickly going pending.
What many (including agents) don't realize is that our local market has been slowing since last January, even as buyers still had to overbid on properties to get their offers accepted. This slowdown coincides with rising interest rates (go figure).
So How Bad Is It?
A home taking an average of 1.6 months to go pending is actually still considered a seller's market. It's just that the market has gone from 150 mph to 70 mph. The average sale price has been falling over the same period but its still way higher than in years past.
