Charlotte Region real estate inventory continued its downward trend over the last few months giving home sellers more confidence to put their home for sale and actually get their home sold. With doom and gloom about the economy, foreclosures, and underwater mortgages dominating the local and national news, it was good to see that inventory levels are beginning to show signs of more reasonable levels. After peaking in February at a 90-day rolling average high of nearly 20 months of inventory, levels continued to drop as they approach last year's levels.
Part of the reason for the declining inventory is that home sellers who, in the past, may have wanted to just "test the market" to see if they could sell their home, in general have decided to sit this market out. New listings are down for the first half of the year between 20% and 25% compared with previous years.
While new listings remained flat, closings steadily increased over the first half of the year. Closings for the first part of the year were down around 35% compared with last year, but they closed the gap in July to only 18.3% down. Though this is an improvement, we are still down 51% compared with the high in July 2006.
To bring it to more specific price ranges, we saw improvement in every price range over the last few months with the most improvement in the over $1 Million price range. While in many prior months, fewer than 10 homes over $1 Million were sold each month out of more than 1000 homes on the market, last month 23 homes sold, giving us home that this category is beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In addition, the First Time Homebuyer Tax Credit seems to be helping as well with homes under $150,000 getting back very close to last year's levels.
Though we are still much higher with our inventory than all of us would like to be, I am optimistic our downward inventory trend will continue. We continue to receive calls from buyers of all price ranges interested in our homes for sale and home sellers are gaining more confidence as they see "Under Contract" signs going up around their neighborhood.
Comments(0)