Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running. ~African proverb

I thought you might enjoy this proverb. It seems to describe most of us in the real estate industry these days. We are seeing a lot more buyer activity this spring and seem to be running hard every day!

I continue to be encouraged by the real estate market activity we are seeing. There were 1,525 pending sales in February 2011 compared to 1,377 in February 2010 for a 10.7% increase.  February 2009 pending sales were 1,001 so you can see steady improvement.

As you know, I pay the most attention to closings because it is so hard these days to get a transaction to close. Closings are showing the same encouraging trends as pending sales. There were 1,156 closings in February compared to 1,024 closings in February 2010 for a 12.9% increase. There were 873 closings in February 2009.

The trends for prices are not as positive. I believe this is mainly due to the amount of distressed closings. Sixty percent of all closings reported in February 2011 were lender-mediated meaning a foreclosure or a short sale. This is the highest percentage we have seen. The number of traditional closings in February 2011 was down 22% from February 2010 but the lender mediated closings were up 61%. The median sales price of the traditional sales of $165,000 was up 1.9% over February 2010 and the lender-mediated sales price of $82,900 was down 24.2% when compared to February 2010. Read more