Last month I predicted the market would sag in January due to both the normal market decline and the lack of people making offers during the Holiday season [offers made in December usually close in January]. Was my crystal ball accurate? Let’s find out.

For all of Durham County there were 1,896 homes listed for sale at the end of January – an increase of almost 10%. 116 sales closed in January [a drop of just over a third] meaning that it would take 16.3 months of Januarys to work through the current housing inventory. This is a another big step backward from last month’s 9.9 months of inventory and the highest total I’ve seen since I started tracking these numbers.

For the 27713 zip code there were 335 homes listed at the end of January – a 17% increase. Only 24 homes sold during January leaving the
adsorption rate at just under 14 months — almost double the December number and again the highest I’ve seen.

Here’s a look at the communities we’re tracking. If you would like to see data from your community, please let us know in the comments.

I left the column for adsorption rate, but with sales numbers so small, it isn’t useful to calculate it. Like I mentioned above, I believe the staggering drop in sales is due to two main factors;

1. There were very few days in December for buyers to be looking at property. The Holidays ate up a lot of the month, and much of what was left was bitterly cold, so no one was out looking at property.
2. The first iteration of the $8,000 First Time Homebuyer’s Credit made a lot of December closings into November closings.

I am, however, surprised by the number of people who listed their home for the first time in January. Whether it is people trying to trade up before the new tax credit expires, or people trying to move down as their job situation changed, or something entirely different, I don’t know. I do know that those new listings really affected the numbers for January.

What does the crystal ball say for February? I still expect sales to start showing an improvement in February [they can't go much lower, right?] as the weather improves and people again start getting into that new home frame of mind. I also believe people will start thinking about the new, improved tax credit, and that will stir up some movement. We’ll have to wait another four weeks, however, it see if I’m right

Tags: housing stats

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.