This post will be my final look of the statuses for those pending properties taken just prior to the expiration of the First-Time Homebuyers Tax Credit program.
We’re now four months after the expiration of the date that prospective buyers needed to be in contract. During the last four months I’ve tracked how many of those pending sales have closed, remain pending, expired, etc.
See previous posts:
I now feel that enough time has passed to have a fairly accurate picture of the success and failure rates. Additionally, a few of the homes that have fallen out of contract have since re-entered the market and are now pending a second time. Consequently, precise tracking is becoming quite tedious.
So, of the 2,220 pendings on May 1st, 2010:
- 55.7 percent have sold
- 20.1 percent remain pending
- 7.3 percent have re-entered the market
- 16.8 have expired or have been withdrawn
| June 1st – 30 days later | July 1st – 60 days later | August 1st – 90 days later | September 12th | |
| Sold | 20.9% | 39.3% | 48.4% | 55.7% |
| Withdrawn | 5.4% | 10.0% | 13.5% | 16.8% |
| still Pending | 67.0% | 42.2% | 29.6% | 20.1% |
| Back on Market | 6.7% | 8.5% | 8.6% | 7.3% |
smarten
Thanks Guy –
Out of the 1,236 such pending sales that actually closed escrow [55.7%], over a period of 3.4 months, do we know how many purchasers were first time homebuyers capable of taking advantage of the first time homebuyers’ credit? Assuming we don’t, the conclusions which are suggested seem to me to be pretty speculative.
Even if as much as 50% were, we’re talking about an average of about 181 SFR AND condo closings/month – far from earthshaking!
Guy Johnson
smarten,
I don’t know of a way to determine the portion of sales by first-time homebuyers, but I would guess that 50% seems reasonable to me.
Joe
Guy, if your reasonable estimate of 50% is for first-time buyers who received the $8000 credit, do you have a guess of how many received the $6500 move-up/repeat buyer credit? I wold assume the two combined would include the majority of homes that were pending at the time of the credit’s expiration. It wasn’t just a first-time buyer credit.
Guy Johnson
Joe, unfortunately I do not. There simply is no easy way to determine this. The point of the exercise was more to determine how many of the pendings at the time went on to successfully close.
CommercialLender
If the NAR was doing their job and not just shilling real estate transactions with idiocy like “Now is a great time to buy/sell!! [circle one]”, we’d have this data very specifically. Imagine, the NAR reporting how many transactions 1) used a credit, and if so which one(s) they used, 2) buyers bought because of the credit(s), 3) buyers who moved-up to buy, 4) buyers who were true first time buyers, 5) etc. etc.
longerwalk
Whether a homebuyer was/is getting the credit would not be something recorded at a closing. That’s done entirely separately on the U.S. Federal tax return, not something NAR has access to. Yet. That’s not to say someone couldn’t be asking the buyers if they were.