When you're deciding on what to price your home for in order for it to sell, it is interesting to see how long, in general, it is taking for homes to sell in your area. This is known as the absorption rate.

The table below is for all the homes in College Park and Berwyn Heights (20740) during the last 365 days (12 months), 180 days (6 months) and 90 days (3 months). 

This table is very general.  It takes into consideration all homes within all price ranges. Higher priced homes as well as lower priced homes.  Believe it or not, you can actually drill down to the absorption rate within specific price ranges.  For example, if you might want to price your home between $300,000 and $400,000 you can determine almost exactl how long it will take to sell or be absorbed by the market.

So, let's look at this table.  In the last 12 months there have been 199 homes in all of 20740 that have sold and settled.  This averages out to 16.583 or really about 17 homes a month which means that there was an 8.08 month supply of homes available for buyers to buy. Plenty of time to look around, sleep on it. talk to friends, and so on.

As the time frame gets shorter we notice that fewer homes are selling and the length of time to sell is getting longer.  Part of this is winter, a lot of it is the sub-prime mortgage crisis and some of it is the psychological state of mind people get from watching all the doom and gloom on TV and reading it in the paper.

The bottom line for home sellers, though, is to be aware of two things:

1) It's going to take awhile for your home to sell and,

2) Pricing your home competitively will get it to sell sooner rather than later.