240 Days of Housing Inventory Stats in Sacramento

After following some of the discussions on Patrick’s Blog among others, I thought I’d post a follow-up to my October housing stat post. During November and December 2005, the number of new listings fell 25% from 9986 on October 30 to 7439 on January 1:

This trend culminated with a drop of 340 listings over the New Years holiday. However, the trend is now reversing dramatically, and the number of new listings has shot back up to 8554 as of this writing:

Here are some trends I’ve observed:

At the end of each month, there is a large decrease in inventory. I’ve read in other places that MLS listing will drop automatically after 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on what the listing agent chooses.

There is an inventory jump (almost) every Saturday, with a bigger one on the first Saturday of the month. Obviously, the agents want to get their listing in for weekend open houses, and they might wait a week before re-listing a property that was automatically dropped.

The trend we are seeing now in Sacramento is similar to the one we saw last summer. After a big drop in inventory last Fall, we are averaging an inventory gain of over 22 houses per day the start of 2006.

If the trend continues, we’ll surpass the 2005 inventory high by mid-May, and we’ll pass the all-time inventory record for Sacramento of 13507 in 1993 sometime in October. (My numbers don’t always jive with OCRenter’s because I don’t include El Dorado or Yolo in my numbers.) However, there are signs that new listings are accelerating here. Since February 1, the number of new listings has gone up by over 550, which averages to 39 per day.

The listings in the south area, including the New-Home-Mecca of Elk Grove, are increasing much more rapidly than in the north area (which has less new developments.) Over the last year, there has averaged around 150 more listings in the north part of the county, but this trend has suddenly reversed, with the south area now showing 20 more listings than the north:

Since February 1, there were 327 new listings in the south, and 196 in the north. Only “speculating” at this point, but the massive discounts announced by Centex among others might be scaring Elk Grove investors into selling now rather than later.

References:

http://bubbletracking.blogspot.com/2006/02/tracking-sacramento-metro.html http://patrick.net/wp/ http://www.sacbee.com/content/homes/resale/ http://www.centexhomes.com/Sacramento/norcal12hoursale.asp?DivisionID=1016 http://www.benengebreth.org/housingtracker/