OC Homes ‘For Sale’ Hit 8-Month Low

Inquiring minds are upon the OCRegister where the data released earlier this week shows that Orange County homes for sale have reached an 8-month low:

Orange County property owners continue to pull homes off the market. Whether it’s seasonal — or a reaction to sluggish homebuying — remains to be seen! The latest Orange County home inventory report from Steve Thomas at Altera Real Estate as of January 6 says …

In the past two weeks the listing inventory shed 211 homes and dropped below the 10,000
mark for the first time since last May, now totaling 9,987 homes. Last year there were 2,694 fewer homes on the active
listing inventory. Since peaking in September 2010, the active listing inventory has dropped by 16%; that’s over 1,900
homes.

Thomas calculates a “market time” benchmark tracking how many months it theoretically takes to sell all the inventory in the local MLS for-sale listings at the current pace of pending deals being made. By this Thomas logic, as of last Thursday, it would take:

5.10 months for buyers to gobble up all homes for sale at the current pace vs. 4.64 months two weeks ago vs. 3.22 months a year ago vs. 5.62 months two years ago.
Homes listed for under a million bucks have a market time of 4.57 months vs. 12.77 months for homes listed for more than $1 million.
So, basically, it is 2.8 times harder to sell a million-dollar-plus residence!
And just so you know, the million-dollar market represents 16% of all homes listed and 6% of all homes that entered into escrow in the past 30 days.

Of course, when the banks finally begin to unload all of their inventory, it will greatly increase the overall MLS inventory.

Basically, if you want to know the real ‘for sale’ inventory you need to take the new monthly bank inventory into effect. That is, the monthly foreclosures being taken back. For the total number of houses that should be available ‘for sale’, multiply the MLS inventory in California by approximately 4.25 to get the real total inventory.