A breakout spring market?

Banks are still skittish about lending and there are lots of stories circulating about appraisers balking at sale prices. That means some of these pending sales will likely collapse before the closing.

While some degree of fallout is always the case – that’s why they are called pending sales – there may very likely be a higher number of misfires this spring.

Second, the weather may be playing tricks on us all here. An extremely mild winter meant that sales activity never completely fell off over the winter and began escalating significantly as early as February.

Basically, the spring market got off to the kind of early start rarely seen in New England.

The result may have been to front load sales early in the season. Will there be any buyers left when the inevitable slowdown comes this summer, or will we be left with another June collapse like the one that followed the expiration of the $8,000 home buyer tax credit in the spring of 2010?

That will be crucial in determining whether this turnaround is for real or just a flash in the pan.

Still, the sales figures so far look pretty impressive.

The number of homes put under agreement this spring has been the highest since the recession, smoking the frenzy of activity during the first four months of 2010 when the home buyer tax credit was set to expire. (15,517 homes were put under agreement over the past four months, compared to 13,773 in the spring of 2010, for a 12.6 percent increase.)

Pending condo sales are also soaring, up nearly 31 percent from April 2011.

It was the 12th straight month that pending sales have risen for both homes and condos, MAR reports.