Louisville homes for sale see declining prices over past two years

With 2010 ending, there's no better time to look back and reflect at just how genuinely horrible the Louisville real estate marketplace has been and how bad the future appears to be Louisville homes on the market! How was that for a enjoyable opening?

As opposed to going through all sorts of information, I wish to take a look at only two charts these days. The 1st will be for asking prices along with the second is going to be inventory levels of homes actively in the marketplace within the city of Louisville. I will not be looking at surrounding counties, and this information doesn't consist of sold homes, multi-family units or condominiums, just single family homes for sale in Jefferson County.

I'll open with asking prices, the dollar quantity that home sellers are setting on their listings when they're on the market and hoping to locate a buyer. Normally, when we have a decent market, you'd expect small increases in costs. To ensure that when we compare property costs in December of 2010 to December of 2009, we would usually want to see a little rise. And if we glance even further back than last year, we'd expect to see an even bigger boost.

But that is not the case in our present environment! Our prices nowadays 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 too as trend lines over the exact 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. Instead of increasing property values, we have truly seen an virtually 3% drop!

To drive the point house further, if we pick almost any date, and look backwards, we will see that our 2010 values are well off previous measurements. As an example, let's take a look at median asking prices of Louisville homes for sale on July 1st for every of the past two years. In 2010, property costs had been $155,000 on the initial day of July. One year earlier, asking prices were at $169,000. For the percentage lovers out there, which is over an 8% drop in one 12 months. How about selecting a date in the springtime, for instance the initial day in April? In 2010, data shows median asking prices at $154,000 compared to $160,000 in 2009.

OK, so now I've identified that asking prices of Louisville homes have not been spectacular the past two years. It is time to move on to inventory levels of homes for sale. Back in December of 2008, there were around 3,750 single family homes for sale in the city of Louisville, according to saved information points. That quantity grew to a higher level of over 5,300 earlier this year before dropping back to the most recent rating of roughly 4,300 readily available units.

I imagine you might argue that we have seen a significant reduction of number of real estate available on the market, since we dropped about 1,000 properties within the past nine or ten months. But that ignores the reality that we presently have additional homes for sale than we did at this time last 12 months and also the calendar year just before.

If you're an objective individual, you've got to take a look at the information and recognize that our costs are lower now than at this time in either of the two preceding years, and at the same time, we have far more houses available on the market at this time than either of the two preceding years. Obviously, this isn't the sign of a recovering market, but rather an indication that we still have a great deal of real estate to get and equity to restore just before we can say our market has rebounded.