Showing trends
It’s clear that we had a short term spike of showing activity in March and April. This was due to
(a) an unusually low number of homes on the market inventory, so the available homes were shown A LOT
(b) interest rates really started to increase, pushing some people off the fence
Since April, we have seen inventory increase to 2012 levels. Buyers are a little more active than last year (in closed sides), so the number of showings per listing is about the same as last year. It all makes sense.
You’ll see that our August ’13 showing traffic was less than Aug ’09 when we had the first time tax credit. That’s OK.
Overall, this tells me that we’re going to have a strong 4Q… the buyers are looking , and we have enough inventory to show.