Graphs and Numbers, Housing Sales Reports Part 2. In this lesson, we're going to to review some graphs and more information from the article Orange County Housing Report, Low Rates Prop Up Affordability, dated June 2021. We will continue with more information and vocabulary on housing and sales and markets. Paragraph 8 and 9 are both about active listings. This refers to the houses that are for sale at the moment of the report. Let's read paragraph 8. The active listing inventory added 8 homes in the past couple of weeks, nearly unchanged, and now sits at 2,255 homes. With kids getting out of school, summer vacation has arrived and so has this summer market for housing. Typically, demand for houses slightly drops with the distractions of summer, which allows the inventory to rise. Yet, housing is far from typical given today's 2021's exceptionally hot levels. That means that the supply of available homes to purchase will not rise enough to get to a much more normal, healthy, sustainable level until mortgage rates start to rise. Let's look at some of that special vocabulary that's underlined in this paragraph. Demand in this case is a need to buy a house. Slightly drops is to go down a little or decrease a little. Hot levels refers to a housing market with houses selling very quickly. And rise is to go up or to increase. Paragraph 9 continues with active listings. Since comparing year over year data in housing is not accurate this year due to COVID-19 skewing the data last year, it is much better to compare current levels to the 5-year average from 2015 to 2019. From May 1st to May 15th, there were 424 fewer new for sale signs in Orange County, 20% less than the 5-year average. The lack of available replacement homes has many homeowners alarmed about selling. They are fearful that there will be nothing to buy, limiting the number willing to participate. This will continue to be an issue until rates rise, which will result in the inventory rising from its ultra low levels. Let's look at the two vocabulary items here. Skewing, this word comes from geometry where it has a meaning of a line being off center. So in this article, skewing gives the idea that data is out of the ordinary, unexpected or unusual. Inventory, here, of course, means supply and it is the amount or number of houses available to buy. This graph shows the first part of 2021, there was a lower level or supply of inventory of houses for sale than each of the three prior years. Paragraph 10, we read, last year 2020, at the end of May, there were 5,044 homes on the market, 2,789 additional homes or 124% more. Let's see what this means. In the graph, you can see the little green box I added, which says that 2,255 homes were for sale at the end of May 2021. And let's see how we get to that information. First, in May of 2020 there were 5,044 homes on the market. You can see this in the graph at this point on the green line, or the 2nd up from the bottom. Paragraph 10 says that in May of 2020 there were 2,789 more homes on the market than in May of 2021. So we take the 5,044, subtract 2,789, which comes to 2,255 houses for sale at the end of May 2021. And we can see that connection here. Now to get to the percentage, we take the 2,789 divided by 2,255, which equals 1.236, of course it's rounded up to 124%. Now, some people may be more interested in the percentage of reduction of inventory, of houses for sale In May 2021 as compared to inventory in 2020. Use this equation to find that percentage and how to form the sentence. 2,255 divided by 5,044 equals 0.447, which can be rounded up to 45%. A sentence we can write about this is, there were 45% fewer houses available for sale in May 2021 than there were one year before. You may want to stop the recording for a few moments if you wish to review these numbers, they are a little bit complicated. So now let's refer to the graph again. This is a new graph and it shows the Orange County hot market, notice that red line at the top or the top curved line with an arrow pointing to it. So this red line in the graph, that top line, shows pending sales for the first few months of 2021. This illustrates the idea of a red-hot or sizzling-hot market. And let's read about this in paragraph 11. Demand readings are red-hot today, yet would be even hotter if more home owners opted to list their homes for sale. The trend of fewer homeowners selling will be here to stay until rates rise and homes take a bit longer to sell, allowing for the inventory to climb. Expect demand to drop slightly with the beginning of the summer market. Even though today's market is sizzling hot, the distractions of summer, from the beach to family vacations, will be magnified this year due to coming out of the pandemic, which will slow demand slightly. And some special vocabulary here is red-hot, hotter, sizzling hot. These are all referring to this type of market that's illustrated and it has to do with homes being sold very quickly. Now here is the same graph again, remember that the red line was in 2021 and that red line stopped in May because this report was generated In June of 2021. So that's why the line doesn't go all the way, the red line does not go all the way to the right-hand side. Now the green line, which does go up and down quite a bit, that is from 2020. And notice this extreme drop here when the green line goes down, this is referred to as a dramatic drop in the paragraph that we're going to read. So let's read this. Last year 2020, demand was at 2,035 and was swiftly recovering from the depths of the start of the pandemic. Now this swiftly recovering is quickly returning to a better position and you can see that at this point where you have the arrow pointing as the green line is going up and up very quickly. This is often referred to as a V shape recovery because it looks like a letter V. Okay, another variable discussed in housing sales reports is expected market time, which is a type of prediction and statistics from a previous time which is called days on the market. These types of numbers are typical in all types of markets because it means the company has inventory and money invested in the inventory which is waiting to be sold. The job of the sales department is to have the least waiting amount of time to sell the product. Let's look at paragraph 13. In the past two weeks, the expected market time or the number of days to sell all Orange County listings at the current buying pace remained unchanged at 22 days. It has been stuck at 22 days since the end of April. It is a very hot sellers market, less than 60 days, where there are a ton of showings, sellers get to call the shots during the negotiating process. Multiple offers are the norm and home values are rising rapidly. Last year the expected market time was at 74 days, drastically different than today, but improving rapidly. Here are some of these special vocabulary items. Call the shots is an expression. It means to be in control. Rising rapidly is to go up very quickly. Drastically different, very very different. And improving rapidly, getting better very quickly. Let's look at this table regarding expected market time and days on the market. This EMT, or expected market time, is referring to May of 2021, and days on the market is for 2020. And those are real statistics, the days on the market. Remember that's passed. EMT is a prediction. And this chart is not focusing so much, the chart we're going to see, it's not focusing on percentage but actual days. So let's look at this bar chart and or bar graph is another name for it. This shows the EMT prediction in blue or on the left-hand side of each pair of bars. And the DOM, or days on the market, in 2020 is in green or the right hand side in each pair of bars. So please notice that the information for the EMT is in the second column on the table at the top. And those are illustrated in the bar graph in the blue or left-hand side. And the days on the market are the very last column and those are illustrated in the color green in the bar graph. So this is a big difference, right? It is clear in this bar graph that the average number of days on the market in 2021 is really different from those in 2020. This can be very impressive when you're giving a presentation to use a bar graph like this rather than a chart like the one above that we see here. Even though it's the same information. It's because the bar graph can give a very visual indication of the statistics. Let's read an example sentence. The bar graph shows the average number of days on the market in 2021 is quite different when compared to 2020. Let's look at a bar graph with information from the same table in the previous slide. But this time we only see the expected or projected days on the market according to the price ranges for houses for the sale. In this graph we are not comparing two years. We are looking at expected days on the market for one month but by price range. So it's another way to give this information. What kind of sentence could you make to express this information? Let's see some examples. For May 2021, the number of days for detached homes to be on the market in the lower price ranges up to $1.25 million was about the same. However, from house is priced at $1.25 million and up, the number of days projected to be on the market increased as the house price increased. We have reviewed a lot of information from this Orange County Housing report. Let's practice how to express some information with a pie chart. So here is our pie chart, and notice this first part is the chart title. And this at the bottom is the chart legend. So you always want to understand what the colors mean and what categories they represent. And be sure you know what the chart title is and the chart legend. So how would you describe the information in this chart? I'm going to show you some examples of ways to describe information in the chart. If you'd like to stop the video recording for a moment, you can try and write some of your own sentences, it's up to you. I'm going to go ahead now and show you some examples I have for you. Here is the first example. Out of all the attached homes in OC, Orange County, there are only 7% in the lowest price range of $250,000 or less. The largest percentage of attached homes, 30%, are in the second price range of $250,000 to $500,000. There are 26% in the $500,000 to $750,000 price range. There are 16% in the $750,000 to $1 million price range. Of the attached homes for sale, there are 21% in the highest price range of $1 million or more. Of course there are many other different ways that you can write sentences for this information. These are just some examples for you. Hopefully these two lessons on graphs and charts have given you some new ways or ideas of how to read and understand data and numbers in reports as well as how to express them in your speaking and writing. There is a practice activity that goes with this lesson. It will be good to review what we have discussed in these lessons on describing graphs. Don't forget you can find the full article, The Orange County Housing Report, Low Rates Prop Up Affordability in this module.
