A Possible Light at the End of the Tunnel

The first Tuesday of every month is Sales Meeting in my office. That's the day we all file into the conference room and hear about who sold what the previous month. This involves a lot of Power Point slides, coffee, donuts, giggling and smart ass comments. It's a good time.

Some meetings are good, because the company made its goals the previous month in terms of listings taken, pending sales turned in, and closed sales.

There haven't been a lot of those good meetings lately.

But just as we were all on the brink of despair, thinking those graph lines on the Power Point slides were doomed to only go down and not up, something amazing happened last month: business picked up. We actually had our best month since July 2007, making our goals for both pending and closed sales. Even better, the number of pendings and closings for this May was only slightly down, 5% or so, from May of last year.

Listings taken were way down, but as someone in the crowd pointed out, most of the houses in Knoxville are already on the market anyway, so what's left to list? Hehehe. Yes, we have some budding comedians over at West Town. Actually, our inventory is about the same as it was this time last year - it's just that houses are taking a lot longer to sell, if they sell at all.

So, the question is this: are our numbers an indicator of what's going on in the rest of the Knoxville market? Unfortunately, my crystal ball is broken, so the answer to that question will have to wait until the May Home Sales Report comes out in a few days. For now, I'm just happy to have caught a glimpse of a possible light at the end of the real estate tunnel.