All Over Albany

Lots of houses

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.