I have sensed a bottoming of the market for the last month or two but I hadn’t seen the hard data to support it just yet, until today.  Ready for this?  In the markets that the Heinrich team specializes in (Carmel, Pebble Beach, Carmel Valley, Big Sur, Monterey, Pacific Grove, and the Monterey-Salinas Hwy) we have seen 94 pending sales in the last 30 days.  In the 30 day period prior it measured 67.  Prior to that it was 63, and prior to that it was 67.  To go from the mid 60’s per month for a while and then jump all the way to 94 is what I call dramatic.  What’s your read on this?  Is this the sign that buyers think we’re close enough to the bottom?

By the way, or those who say “Grant, isn’t this uptick just a function of seasonality?” I present to you last year’s data compared with this years side-by-side.  Not only can you see that this isn’t really seasonality kicking in, this graph also shows the clear increase in transaction activity from this year versus last year.  Now what do you think?  Have we it bottom?

Pending Sales going back from May 5, 2009