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Real Estate Market Trends

Off market: sold, canceled, expired or withdrawn?

By Richard Dews
© Copyright 2019 by Richard Garrett Dews. All rights reserved.

Homes get listed and become active in the diversely published marketplace, and the home sells or it doesn’t. This latter ending can take several forms. The listing agreement might expire, be canceled or withdrawn. The listing relationship is contractual – with an end date. In the Flathead, that end date is most often near the end of the calendar year (showings often dwindle in the winter). Listing expirations start throttling up in September, peaking in December each year.

I charted single-family residence home sales (by month sold), for the past four years. I added lines for the count of expired listings by month, over the same period (same yearly colors). This includes Flathead County homes originally listed for prices between $150,000 and $999,999.

Listings can also be overtly canceled (seller making a change). In 2018, the most cancellations occurred in October, second most in January.

Finally, listings can be withdrawn – effectively taking them off the market and stopping the days-on-market counter, while continuing the listing contract – usually to skip over periods of decreased activity. If you’re only looking at active listings, you might be missing a lot more choices which were recently expired, canceled or withdrawn. Ask your Realtor.

Richard Dews is CEO of Glacier Flathead Real Estate, a Flathead-based real estate software and services company.