I've been tracking listings in our market for a few months now. I kept hearing that we had way too many listings on the market and although I knew they were high, I also knew that historically, we were right in line.
Several things you need to know when you look at these numbers:
- I've tracked the listings for our entire MLS - and our MLS now allows listings within a several hundred mile radius. This includes Kootenai County (pop. 128,000), elements of surrounding county's AND surrounding states (WA and MT). This is a recent edition - 5 years ago these areas were not included in our listings.
- Our population has increased by an average of 4% per year for the past 13 years.
So, when you compare current listings to numbers from 3 years ago and come up similar in number, you have to realize the ratio was worse 3 years ago than it is now. This means that there are fewer listings per person than there was 3 years ago.
People clearly forget that 2005 was an abnormal year - that although there were significantly fewer listings this was not the norm for our market. We aren't back to our 'norm' quite yet, and sales have already begun to pick up again and listings stablize (with some slight tapering off).
Therefore, my conclusion is that although it 'appears' there are a lot of listings on the market, it's normal for our market - a nice healthy, strong, stable market that appreciates at an average of 9% per annum.
View graph here.
;)
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