Days on market and list-to-sale ratios tell you what already happened. Here’s what I actually watch before advising a client either way.
Every quarter someone forwards me a headline about the market being “up” or “cooling,” usually pulled from a county-wide average that includes zip codes I’d never advise a client to compare against Westlake Village or Hidden Hills. County averages are not wrong, exactly. They’re just answering a different question than the one my clients are asking, which is almost always some version of: what will this specific house, on this specific street, actually do in the next sixty days?
So I don’t start with the headline number. I start with absorption — how many comparable homes sold in a given pocket over the trailing ninety days, against how many are sitting active right now. That ratio tells you more about true buyer appetite in Thousand Oaks or Calabasas than a year-over-year median ever will, because it’s specific to the fifteen or twenty homes a buyer is actually cross-shopping against yours.
Second, I watch the gap between original list price and final sale price on the homes that sold quickly versus the ones that sat. A wide gap on the fast sales usually means the market is pricing ahead of the comps — sellers testing a number and getting it. A narrow gap on the slow sales means buyers are disciplined and won’t chase. Both can be true in the same zip code at the same time, on different streets, which is exactly why the county number is close to useless for a pricing conversation.
Third — and this is the one spreadsheets miss entirely — I watch what happens at the open house. Not attendance count. Whether people linger in the kitchen, whether they ask about the school boundary before they ask about the roof, whether a second showing gets requested within forty-eight hours. That’s a leading indicator; the absorption rate is a lagging one. By the time a lagging indicator confirms a trend, the pricing window that mattered has usually already closed.
None of this replaces a comparative market analysis. It supplements it with the texture that a spreadsheet can’t hold — the same way a light meter tells you the exposure is technically correct without telling you whether the shot is any good. If you’re weighing a listing decision in the next few months, I’d rather walk the specific streets with you than hand you a market report you could have pulled yourself.
“A county average is answering a different question than the one you’re actually asking.”
Jacob SteagallJacob Steagall