More Louisville homes for sale today than two years ago
With 2010 ending, there’s no greater time to look back and reflect at just how truly awful the marketplace has become and how bad the future looks for Louisville homes on the market! How do you like that 1 for a positive opening?
As opposed to going by means of all sorts of data, I want to look at only two charts today. The initial will probably be for asking costs and the second will likely be inventory levels of real estate actively in the marketplace within the city of Louisville. I won’t be looking at surrounding counties, and this data does not include sold houses, multi-family units or condominiums, just single family homes for sale in Jefferson County.
I’ll begin with asking prices, the dollar quantity that house sellers are setting on their listings when they are available on the market and hoping to come across a buyer. Normally, when we have a decent marketplace, you would expect step-by-step increases in prices. To ensure that when we compare residence costs in December of 2010 to December of 2009, we would typically desire to see a tiny rise. And if we look even further back than last year, we would anticipate to see an even greater improve.
But that is not the case in our current environment! Our prices nowadays are lower than they had been in both 2009 and 2008. Ouch. And that holds true for weekly data points recorded over the past two years also as trend lines over the same period. At this point in 2008, weekly data points show a value of about $149,000 for a median asking price. My most recent measurement now shows a median price of $145,000, a $4,000 drop in two years. Rather than growing property values, we have actually seen an nearly 3% drop!
To drive the point house further, if we pick practically any date, and look backwards, we will see that our 2010 values are well off previous measurements. For example, let’s look at median asking costs of on July 1st for each of the past two years. In 2010, property prices were $155,000 on the initial day of July. One 12 months earlier, asking prices had been at $169,000. For the percentage lovers out there, that’s over an 8% drop in 1 year. How about choosing a date within the springtime, for example the first day in April? In 2010, information shows median asking prices at $154,000 compared to $160,000 in 2009.
OK, so now I’ve identified that asking costs of have not been spectacular the last two years. It is time to move on to inventory levels of homes for sale. Back in December of 2008, there had been roughly 3,750 single family homes for sale in the city of Louisville, according to saved information points. That quantity grew to a high water mark of over 5,300 earlier this year just before dropping back to the newest rating of roughly 4,300 readily available units.
I suppose you could argue that we have seen a significant decrease of number of properties available on the market, since we dropped about 1,000 properties in the past nine or ten months. But that ignores the reality that we currently have a lot more homes for sale than we did at this time last year and the 12 months before.
If you are an objective individual, you’ve got to look at the information and recognize that our prices are lower now than at this time in either of the two preceding years, and at the exact same time, we have additional houses available on the market at this time than either of the two preceding years. Obviously, this is not the sign of a recovering market, but rather an indication that we still have lots of homes to get and equity to restore prior to we can say our marketplace has rebounded.
