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.

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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.

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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…)

Normally when I write an article updating readers about Louisville homes for sale, I use charts that go back one full year.  But not today, I wanted to bring in a bit more, if possible, to provide a little more context.  I was able to generate a graph dating back to January 1st of 2009 with the median prices of single family homes for sale in the Louisville real estate market.

This graph has a sine shape to it, which is not unusual in itself, for real estate activity in Louisville, or most any other market.  The seasons have a habit of influencing our local market, and prices will follow along with the demand, or lack thereof.  As you can clearly see from the graph, the median asking price of Louisville homes seems to be at it’s lowest in the winter time, or the very beginning of the year.  Again, not very surprising.  But by adding a (more…)

Almost immediately following May 1st 2010, the Days On Market measurement for Louisville homes for sale dropped like a lead weight.  In just one week’s time, the weekly data points went from about 177 days to 142, a reduction of over one full month’s worth of market time!  This is unheard of.  I have spoken to a few other agents, and most seem to have some trouble coming up with a decent explanation of why the length of time homes are spending on the Louisville real estate market would drop so suddenly, but I feel strongly that it must be connected somehow to the expiration of the Federal tax credit.  Just how it is related, I’m not sure, but that just seems to be too much of a coincidence that the tax credit expired on the last day of April, and the first full data check in May shows a dramatic decrease. hmmm….

One year ago, the number of homes for sale in Louisville, Ky stood at 4,250, with a trend line measurement of just under 4,200.  Just a few months ago, those numbers had swelled to great heights, with weekly data points reaching close to 5,400 homes for sale and the trend line swelled to a bit over 4,800.  But a recent run of high activity in the Louisville real estate market has pushed our inventory levels back down.  Not quite as low as last year’s levels, but much lower than March and April levels.  As of this past week’s measurements, the weekly data points showing the actual number of single family homes for sale in Jefferson County showed a data point of 4,400 units.  The trend line is also heading down, with the most recent measurement coming in at just under 4,600 units.

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.

For the better part of the last year, there existed a price gap between what Louisville homes for sale were asking, when you compared homes that were already on the market to homes that were just coming on to the market.  On the graph below, you will notice that our existing inventory in the Louisville real estate market is shown in gold.  The black line on the graph shows the median asking price of the group of listings that just came on to the market that one week.  Normally we see that new listings show up on the market asking less than homes that have been on the market.  This makes a lot of sense, in a bad or slow market.  If you keep noticing that your neighbors can’t sell their homes at the prices they are asking, doesn’t it make sense that if you were to decide to sell, that you would ask less than the home down the street?

But what if you notice that all of the homes on your street are selling?  And maybe they are even getting the prices they were hoping for?  In that situation, we would expect to see new listings start asking more than before, and maybe even catch up to what the existing homes for sale are asking.  And that’s exactly what we have seen in the past month or so.  The median price of homes for sale has just about equalized for both groups of homes.