Sacramento has declared we are officially a couple of weeks away from normal. California opens up on June 15th. It will not exactly be normal, masks will still be required for planes and perhaps some stores. It has been quite a time.
I want to start with the chart of closed escrows, because the inset box shows the number of monthly escrows closed over the past 12 months. Let’s keep in mind the timing of how things shut down. The country began shutting down mid-March 2020. Since escrows take about 45 days to close, the impact of a slowdown in mid-March was seen in May closings. As the panic of the pandemic set in, everything stopped, including real estate sales. May 2020 resulted in only 80 homes closing escrow, a record low for the past decade.
