I’m including something new for this month; two graphs that cover pending sales, active listings and the pending/active ratio over a three year period, (2007 through 2009). Although we saw changes on a month by month basis, we didn’t realize how dramatic this was until we plotted the numbers over the long run.
As you can see our inventory was at its peak in 2007 at over 13,000 active listings. The low point was last month in December at 3,690. This is at the lowest level since I began tracking 38 cities back in May of 2005. Pendings have climbed due to the increase in buyers and the prolonged escrow periods. With increased competition for fewer properties, we’re beginning to see prices in some areas sell, on average, over asking and slowly creep up. Months supply dropped to 1.7 months over all.
January numbers brought an interesting surprise. We actually saw an increase in inventory, something we haven’t seen in quite some time. We expect a spike in January after the holidays, but this was an unexpected jump of 16 to 17%, unusually high. Although we expected this to be due to increased REOs coming onto the market, it wasn’t. The percentage of REO listings actually dropped from 23% to 19%, while short sales remained stable. The months supply increased from 1.7 months to 2 months. Although this could be signaling that we’re bottoming out in some areas, it’s still too early to determine that this is an actual trend. It’ll be interesting to see what the coming months bring.
You can download PDFs of my January 2010 numbers here.
–Glen
