August Abq Home Sales Drop From July

The Business First newspaper accepted the word from the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors that August was a good month for home sales in metro Albuquerque. And it was a good month, but GAAR, which released the August sales report today, was blowing a little smoke.
The good news came in comparison to August 2014. In comparison to July and June, the indicators were down.
During August, buyers closed on 948 home purchases, 15% more than the 22 sales closed during August 2014. Homes with the sale pending during August were 1,087, a 27% increase from a year before.
Closed and pending sales were down six percent from July and also declined from June.
The homes that closed were on the market an average of 54 days, two days quicker than June and five days ahead of August.
Sales of townhouses and condominiums behaved in roughly the same way with a nice increase from August 2014 and down from July 2015. A difference with detached homes is that condo sales prices, both the median and the average, dropped from July and from August 2014.
For detached homes, median and average prices increased from July—7% to $226,254 for the average prices and, for the median, 3% to $189,950. The prices also showed a healthy increase from August 2014 and were the highest August prices since 2006 for the median and 2008 for the average. However, both median and average prices were below June.
During August, three homes in metro Albuquerque sold for $1 million or more. My guess is that these three pulled up the average price by $2,250.
My favorite rough metric relates closed sales in one month to pending sales the previous month. The theory is that since sales take about 45 days to close, sales close in the month following the appearance on the pending list. During June, 80% of the May pending sales closed. For July the pending sales percentage was a very high 85% with 82% in August.
If the seasonal pattern appears, sales will drop again in September. During 2014, August sales of detached homes were 822 followed by September with 703 sales.