Two year market review of Louisville homes

With 2010 ending, there may be no greater time to look back and reflect at just how truly awful the Louisville real estate market has been and how poor the future appears to be Louisville households available for sale!

Rather than going via all sorts of data, I desire to look at only two charts nowadays. The 1st is going to be for asking costs and also the second will be inventory levels of houses actively in the marketplace in the city of Louisville. I won't be looking at surrounding counties, and this data doesn't contain sold properties, multi-family units or condos, just single family homes for sale in Jefferson County.

I'll begin with asking prices, the dollar quantity that home sellers are setting on their listings when they're available on the market and hoping to come across a buyer. Typically, when we have a decent market, you'd expect small increases in costs. To ensure that when we compare home costs in December of 2010 to December of 2009, we would normally desire to see a tiny rise. And if we look even further back than last year, we would anticipate to see an even greater increase.

But which is not the case in our current environment! Our costs today are lower than they were in both 2009 and 2008. Ouch. And that holds true for weekly data points recorded over the past two years as well 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 truly seen an almost 3% drop!

To drive the point property further, if we pick almost any date, and look backwards, we will see that our 2010 values are well off previous measurements. For instance, let's take a look at median asking prices of Louisville homes for sale on July 1st for each of the past two years. In 2010, residence costs were $155,000 on the 1st day of July. One calendar year earlier, asking prices had been at $169,000. For the percentage lovers out there, which is over an 8% drop in 1 year. How about choosing a date inside the springtime, for instance the 1st day in April? In 2010, information shows median asking costs at $154,000 compared to $160,000 in 2009.

OK, so now we've recognized that asking costs of Louisville homes have not been spectacular the last two years. It's time to move on to inventory levels of homes for sale. Back in December of 2008, there had been approximately 3,750 single family homes for sale in the city of Louisville, according to registered data points. That quantity grew to a high water mark of over 5,300 earlier this calendar year before slipping back to the most up-to-date measurement of around 4,300 accessible units.

I imagine you might argue that we have observed a serious reduction of number of homes in the marketplace, since we dropped about 1,000 properties in the past nine or ten months. But that ignores the reality that we presently have more homes for sale than we did at this time last 12 months along with the year prior to.

If you are an objective person, you've to take a look at the data 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 residences 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 a great deal of homes to get and equity to restore just before we can say our market has rebounded.