While watching the Presidential debate tonight, something made me think to start to track the pending sales activity day by day to see if I could see if there has been a steep fall off of activity given Wall Street’s implosion the past 3 weeks.

Starting with September 1, 2008, I looked at each day up until October 15, 2008.  There are 3, 15 day periods to look at.  They are broken down below.  The numbers represent the number of properties pended during each period for Hennepin County only:

Sept. 1-15:  207

Sept. 16-30: 437

Oct. 1-15:  566

What’s interesting about this is that properties get contracts on them before they go pending.  A buyer and seller agree to a contract, but 90% of the time, a buyer has an inspection.  The property does not pend until the buyer and seller have worked through the inspection and come to an agreement on items to be fixed or if the sale price should be adjusted.  The fact that this many buyers are still continuing to take that next step in the contract and go forward toward closing is a huge deal…especially with the backdrop of  the DOW dropping 700+ point every other day.

I will continue to monitor this and publish new data from time to time.  I think it’s helpful for all of us to see what others are doing in terms of buying property.