I like to switch subjects of my articles every once in awhile and today I would like to tackle inventory levels for Louisville homes for sale.  I often get the question “How’s the market?”, and that’s a hard one to answer.  Is the person who is asking comparing today’s trends to three months ago?  Six months ago?  Twelve months or two years?  I suppose it always depends what we compare it to.

I have included a chart below that shows the number of homes for sale in the Louisville market over the past year, with one line showing weekly data points and the other line shows a trend line, which some people call a 90 day rolling average. Just one look and you can see how difficult it is to answer the question I receive frequently, “How’s the real estate market in Louisville?”  Well, inventory levels are lower now than they were three or four months ago, but higher than they were a year ago.

(more…)

For several months, homes for sale in Louisville were averaging around 175 or 180 days to leave the market, as shown in black on the graph below.  But that number has fallen, and pretty dramatically at that.  In the first week of May, the average DOM for Louisville homes for sale fell from about 177 days to 143, the equivalent of a full month’s worth of market time!  Of course, that kind of change will affect the trend line, shown in gold, and as expected, the trend starting bending down pretty quickly after that, and appears to still be dropping, even though weekly data seems to have settled around 145 or 147 days.

(more…)

Last week, I wrote a short update pointing out that the median prices of Louisville homes for sale had stalled a bit at $155,000.  It appears that not much has changed this week, with another measurement right at $155,000.  Even the trend line, which usually varies a bit from the weekly data points, shows very little change and seems to be leveling out.  I suppose I should be happy about stability after so many ups and downs, but if you look at the beginning of the graph you will see where values were in Louisville this time last year and they were quite a bit higher.

Another data point I like to track for Louisville real estate is the inventory level, which measures just how many homes there are for sale in Jefferson County.  For my purposes, I track only single family homes and only in the city limits of Louisville, so I am not counting many properties in surrounding counties.  Looking at the numbers below, we have another case of good news, bad news.  The good news is that there aren’t as many homes for sale in Louisville as there were just a few months ago.  But the bad news is that we are still seeing more homes available today than were for sale this time last year.  Lower prices combined with higher inventory is not a great mix for a recovering real estate market.

On my next article, I will look at how long Louisville homes for sale are staying on the market, and those three measurements, when taken together, will give you a really good idea of how the local market is behaving.  I think we can all guess a bit, but I will try my best to remain optimistic and wait until next week to burst my bubble!

The median asking prices for homes for sale in Louisville have fallen just a bit since the beginning of May when the median asking price was right around $159,000.  But in the last few weeks, that number has leveled out at $155,000, at least if we are looking at the weekly data points, shown in black.  The trend line, calculated by averaging many weeks worth of data together, and then redone every week, shows that the recent upswing might be leveling off, due to large part to the last few weeks of flat numbers.

Over the past few weeks, and maybe even months, I have talked about inventory levels of Louisville homes for sale, and how they have dropped since the highest levels we have seen this past year.  Today, I want to extend the timetable and look at inventory levels for the Louisville real estate marketplace, and see just how well, or poorly, we are doing.  On the graph below, I have pushed the dates all the way back to January 1st, 2009 and then graphed the number of homes currently for sale at any given point in the Louisville area.

The most interesting point to take away from the graph above is just how high recent levels of homes for sale in Louisville have been recently.  While it is true that the last few weekly measurements of how many single family homes are for sale in Louisville have been decreasing, it is interesting to see just how much higher the measurement is today than it was in the beginning of 2009.  (more…)

The trend line for asking prices for Louisville Ky homes for sale is still tracking up, according to weekly data released by Altos Research.  The weekly data points have stalled a bit over the past five or so weeks, right around $158,000 median asking price for single family homes in the city of Louisville.  But the trend line, calculated by average 90 days worth of data points and then repeating every week, is still climbing.  It appears that the trend line bottomed out at $148,000 and is now just shy of $155,000.  While that appears to be good news, we still have some work to do if we are going to see median asking prices approaching the values the Louisville real estate market saw a year ago, around $163,000, give or take.

In just the past few months, the number of homes for sale in Louisville has fallen by about 1,000 units. Normally this would be a signal that we are entering, or had fully entered, a seller’s market. But in today’s environment, all that means is that we have worked our way through some of the bloated inventory we have added to our marketplace over the past year. Now, instead of welcoming a seller’s market, we are simply getting back to a more “normal” number of Louisville homes for sale. Whether or not you view this as good news, or bad news, depends upon your basic outlook. Are you a pessimist, or an optimist? After our seasonally strong selling season of spring, are we glad to be back to where we were last year this time, or are we upset that we didn’t make more progress working through our standing inventory?

Last week I wrote a few articles about different parts of town and how most zip codes in the Louisville real estate market saw a big jump in the median asking price of homes for sale.  As part of my articles, I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation about why prices might jump so severely in just one week, and the best I could do was to tie it to the expiration of the Federal Tax Credit.  More buyers came out to buy, for the most part, lower priced homes, and once those left the market, there was a relatively higher number of more expensive homes available, all of which would push the median sales price higher.  And now, check out the graph below.  The average number of days that Louisville homes for sale are staying on the market dropped 20% this past week.  Wow, that’s kind of crazy.

If you look at the chart above, you will see that this big drop was almost immediately after the 1st of May, right when the Federal Tax Credit expired.  Coincidence?  I doubt it.  I think the most likely scenario is two fold.  First, some people obviously bought houses at the end of April to make sure they got their $8,000 tax credit, and if the bulk of those homes had been on the market for quite awhile, that would bring the average days on market down.  But that seems far fetched to think the DOM measurement would fall so quickly for that reason alone.  I think that in addition to the extra sales we saw, there was probably a large number of sellers who thought that the tax credit was their last real chance to sell their homes, and failing to get a contract in place by April 30th, they simply took their homes off the market, leaving only (relatively speaking) homes that haven’t been on the market as long and the sellers aren’t quite burnt out yet by failing to get a contract.

Two months ago, the median asking price of single family homes in Louisville hit a low water mark of $145,000.  In the time since then, there have been about nine weekly measurements taken by Altos Research, and it appears that almost every single one of them showed a price increase, with only two small decreases.  As a result, the median asking price has grown from $145,000 to $159,000 in that short time.  This rise in price has been a big enough change to bend the trend line and show a positive trend.  The big question remains how the market reacts to the end of the tax credit and whether sellers can keep their confidence and keep pushing prices up, or whether buyers dry up and prices start falling once again.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Inventory levels of Louisville homes for sale have dropped over 750 units in the past six weeks alone, but levels are still higher than at this point last year.  As recently as early or mid-March, inventory was at incredibly high levels, above 5,300 single family homes in the Louisville real estate market as defined by Jefferson County.  Even with a recent flurry of activity and a decrease in the number of available homes for sale, the current inventory level is still a bit higher than it was this time last year.  Which makes me question a bit the large number of Realtors around the city who are touting our recent run of sales as proof that we have turned a corner.