Holy Heck! Do you remember how I’ve been saying that the year-to-year market stats have looked bad because we’ve been comparing this year to last year when we had the first time home buyer tax credit? Well, now we’ve got a STELLAR stat that supports this assumption.
The tax credit expired last year at the end of April. In order to get the credit, you had to have a property under contract by April 30th and you had until June 30th to get it closed.
What this means is that we’re still going to see a ton of “tax credit” sales from May and June of 2010 which will make the number of closed sales in May and June of this year pale by comparison (down 15% from May of ’10 to May of ’11). Where we start to see a difference, though, is in pending sales. When we compare pending sales from May of last year to May of this year, we see an increase of 45.1% and this give us a an un-inflated view of how our market is performing. There is a lot of real estate out there exchanging hands without the support of tax credits.
The year-to-year comparisons in average and median sale prices are down by 4.8% and 7.9 %, respectively, but we seem to be holding steady with the month-to-month numbers: down 1.8% for the average and up 0.1% for the median.
The inventory in months decreased from 7.2 months to 6.8 months, which is good. This is the amount of time that it would take to sell all the homes currently listed on the market, given the current rate of sales. Typically, 6 months of inventory is what we would call a balanced market: neither a buyer’s or seller’s market. To give you some perspective, in 2009 the inventory in months got as high as 19.2 months.
The thing to keep in mind is that the number of homes that went under contract in May of this year is more than May of last year or May of 2009. We’ve been having a pretty good Spring, all things considered.
Tags: 2011, market, portland, Real Estate, statistics
Avg. Sales Price: $289,800
Avg. Days on Market: 121
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