Monday Morning Numbers 1/12/09

Here we go again... If this is the first time you're seeing these numbers, go back and look at the 1/5/09 posting for some background. Here's what the Lompoc Valley real estate market looks like this week:

Active Listings: 129
Contingent Listings: 17
Pending Listings: 51 (25.89% of the inventory)
Price changes for the past week: 7 (4.79%)
Sold listings for the previous two weeks: 8

Not a lot of change this week. I had kind of expected that we might see a bit of an increase in the inventory. We typically see some of the listings that expire at the end of the year come back on the market in the first week or so of the new year, but we didn't have a lot of those this year, and only one or two of those came back so far.

18.5% of our total active inventory this morning is bank owned, and 47.9% are short sales. At the current rate, we have about 4.9 months of inventory. Taking out contingent sales, we're down to 4.3 months. The generally accepted benchmark in the industry for a buyer's market is over 6 months of inventory. While we have fallen below that level, this market is still ripe with opportunities for qualified buyers. You may have to compete in a multiple offer scenario - especially on REO's, but there there are some great values to be had.

Come back later this week for my best guess at what 2009 has in store for us.