Lots of houses

housing inventory

The Capital Region's supply of homes for sale, as measured by "months of inventory."

We were skimming through the latest package of Capital Region home sales stats from the Greater Capital Association of Realtors when the above graph caught our eye. It depicts the trend in "inventory" in the Capital Region.

Here's how GCAR describes inventory: "Compares the number of active listings available to the average monthly pending sales for the last twelve months." GCAR currently had the Capital Region's November inventory pegged at a little more than 10 months. Compared to the last decade that's relatively high, but it's down about 11 percent from the same month last year.

The situation probably looks more extreme than it actually is. As noted above, the inventory figure is based on "average monthly pending sales for the last twelve months." And last year both pending and closed sales were way down. In fact, November 2009 pending sales were up 10.6 percent compared to the same period last year -- and closed sales were up more than 36 percent. (It will be interesting to see what happens to the inventory next spring during the usual new listings rush.)

As you might expect with all that inventory, the average number of days it takes to sell a house is up. GCAR has November's figure at 85 days -- that's up from 83 days last November and 77 days in 2007.

The median sale price for homes in November was $178,000 -- that's down a little more than six percent from last year.

Note: GCAR's Capital Region median also includes Montgomery, Schoharie and Washington counties.

Graph from GCAR. It's been clipped and re-sized to fit the space.

Comments

If anything, it looks like things are going to get worse in the coming months.

If the pattern holds we're going to see a big upswing in teh next couple months. I don't think the economy is markedly improving (see today's 2nd downward revision of the last quarter's GDP calculation) so I'd say its still a buyers market for the foreseeable future, of course realtors are probably looking forward to spinning the decline of the last 6 months as a continuing trend, but I doubt it.

Dont forget to mention the main reason figures spiked for Nov., everyone was rushing to grab something to take advantage of the Homebuyers Credit. I'm fairly certain that if these same folks knew the credit date would be extended....we would've never saw figures like those.

Don't forget the First-Time Home Buyer's tax credit has been extended to April 2010: Move-in ready affordable cottage for sale in village of New Scotland; mountain views/beautiful rural suburb of Albany.in award-wining Voorheesville school district:

www.339maplerd.com

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