Two year market review of Louisville homes

With 2010 ending, there is no greater time to glance back and take stock at just how really awful the Louisville real estate market has become and how poor the future looks for Louisville properties available for sale!

Instead of going by way of all sorts of information, I need to look at only two charts nowadays. The initial will probably be for asking prices and the second might be inventory levels of residences actively available on the market within the city of Louisville. I will not be looking at surrounding counties, and this data doesn't contain sold houses, multi-family units or condominiums, just single family homes for sale in Jefferson County.

I'll begin with asking costs, the dollar amount that home sellers are putting on their listings when they're on the market and hoping to uncover a buyer. Typically, when we have a decent market, you would expect small raises in costs. So that when we compare property prices in December of 2010 to December of 2009, we would typically wish to see a modest rise. And if we glance even further back than this past year, we would expect to see an even greater improve.

But that's not the case in our current environment! Our prices nowadays are lower than they had been 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. Instead of growing house values, we have actually seen an nearly 3% drop!

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

OK, so now I've recognized 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 approximately 3,750 single family homes for sale in the city of Louisville, according to recorded information points. That amount grew to a high water mark of over 5,300 earlier this 12 months before falling back to the most up-to-date rating of roughly 4,300 readily available units.

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

If you are an objective person, you've to look at the data 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 a lot more residences 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 loads of residences to buy and equity to restore prior to we can say our marketplace has rebounded.