Maybe I shouldn’t have looked at this graph!  It looks like the number of homes for sale in Louisville St Matthews is at an all time high, at least for the past year.  This time last year, it appears that there were about 210 homes for sale in 40207, but as of this latest measurement, there are now 240 available units.  Another nugget of bad news, if you are a home seller in St. Matthews, is the trend line, shown in orange.  The severity of it’s increase makes me think that we are heading towards higher numbers still and that we are not currently at an inflection point where our current inventory levels are ready to start decreasing.  Bummer.

Another way to look at the graph above is to lay inventory levels over last year’s info, and see if we have an increase, or decrease, when compared to 12 months ago.  Which is exactly what I have done below with the Year Over Year (YOY) graph of Louisville St Mathews homes for sale inventory graph.

Oops.  Double bummer.  This doesn’t make anything look better!  Except if you look at this way:  The percentage of which we are currently over last years inventory of homes for sale in the Louisville St Matthews real estate market is lower than it was 12 months ago!  But I suppose that means that we still have more homes on the market today than we did last year, and last year, there were more homes on the market than the previous year.  At some point, to get back to a more balanced market in Louisville and St. Matthews, we will need to see fewer homes on the market at a given point then were previously reported.

For the past few months, the average amount of time that Louisville St Matthews homes for sale have spent on the open market has been trending downwards.  Looking at the trend line shown in gold, it appears that we had an inflection point in February or early March, and that homes starting leaving the market a bit quicker than before.  In the very beginning of 2010, St Matthews homes for sale were staying on the market an average of 190 days, if you look at the weekly data points, or about 150 days looking at the 90 day rolling average.  But whichever line you choose to view on the graph, you can clearly see that something changed, perhaps just the seasons, and homes were available for shorter and shorter times.

The graph above is for average time on the market, in days.  But let’s look at a median measurement, where really large, or small numbers, don’t wipe out some interesting data.  The graph below shows us the median days on market for homes for sale in St Matthews, or more specifically, single family homes in 40207.  Wow!  Take a look, the drop off is even more remarkable.

Please remember that the median measurement means that half the homes for sale in St Matthews were above and half were below the number.  So looking back one year ago, we can see that the median DOM was right around 80, which means that half of all of the homes for sale in the St Matthews real estate market were staying on the market for more than 80 days, and the other half was staying on less than 80 days.  That doesn’t sound too bad, I think I would take my chances with those numbers, right?  But fast forward just a few months, now the median number sits at 140 0r 150 days.  Wow, half of all homes on the market were taking longer than 150 days to leave the market!  That’s pretty long, it seems to me.  But since that time, it’s been all downhill, in a good way, and our current median DOM is right about where we were this time last year.

Inventory levels for homes for sale in St Matthews are rising, and it doesn’t matter if you are looking at weekly data points, or a 90 day trend line.  On the graph shared below, both measurements are charted and both are higher than they were this time last year.  For the weekly data points, shown in black, St Matthews homes for sale have seen an increase from just over 200 units to about 232 homes, more than a 10% increase.  The same holds true for the trend line, shown in gold, but with an even bigger percentage increase.  And all of this is after homes in St Matthews had hit year long lows in the very beginning of 2010 with relatively few homes for sale in 40207.

Another way to look at inventory levels of Louisville St Matthews homes for sale is to not only look at the whole number of homes currently for sale, but to break that number down into its component parts:  how many homes are leaving the market each week compared to how many homes are coming on to the market?  In the graph below, that is exactly what I have done.  Each week, a certain number of homes that were once for sale have dropped off the market, due to being sold, or perhaps the owners simply got tired of trying to sell and gave up and took their St Matthews home off the market.  At the same time, there is a different group of home owners, optimistic about their chances, who choose to get their property on the market.  If we look at the difference between these two groups, we should be able to see which way the overall St Matthews real estate market is heading.

Looking at the graph above, we can see that one year ago, St Matthews homes coming onto the market slightly outnumbered the homes leaving the market, or being absorbed into the market.  About October, that trend reversed itself, and we see more homes being absorbed than coming onto the market, which should show up on the first graph above as a reduction in the overall inventory level.  But something seems to have switched in early 2010, as more and more St Matthews homes for sale became available, overtaking the number of homes leaving the market, and since that time, it appears that we have been adding more and more homes to the overall inventory level for the 40207 market inside of Louisville, Ky.

Two different measurements calculating the median asking price of Louisville St Matthews homes for sale have both resulted in similar results of $280,000.  The black line on the graph tracks weekly measurements of all single family homes for sale in 40207, while the gold line tracks the same properties but uses a 90 day rolling average, or trend line, to determine its value.  Both methods have arrived at the same number this past week!  And perhaps with a few more weeks of decent sales activity, asking prices might climb back to where they were one year ago, even though there is little hope for St. Matthews home owners of getting back to the $325,000 mark we saw at the end of 2009.

Only 7 Norbourne Estates homes have sold over the past year, and the property pictured above is the most expensive of them all, by quite a bit, selling for $447,000. In fact, the next most expensive home to have sold in the Norbourne Estates real estate neighborhood sold for only $330,000, well over $100,000 less expensive. Of course, these numbers are according to the Louisville Board of Realtors and does not include any private sales, such as FSBOs, which are not recorded in the same place.

But a different story emerges if you want to discuss homes for sale in Norbourne Estates, when compared to the homes that have sold. As I mentioned, I just sold the most expensive home sold in Norbourne Estates in the past year, but there are currently 3 homes for sale in the subdivision asking more than the $447,000 the pictured home sold for this past week. The most expensive home currently for sale in Norbourne Estates is currently asking $869,900 and has been on the market 235 days.

The Louisville St Matthews real estate market has seen it’s fair share of ups and downs over the past year or two, as most local neighborhoods have.  And for buyers and sellers of St Matthews homes, it is important to keep on top of the real estate trends, to prepare themselves for the current conditions in the marketplace.  For instance, if you are thinking of selling your St. Matthews house, wouldn’t you like to know what other sellers in the area are also asking?  And how long their homes are staying on the market?

Which is why I spend so much time studying the most recent ups and downs that St. Matthews homes for sale are experiencing.  The graph above shows data for single family homes in 40207 going all the way back to January 1, 2009, through this past week and is looking at the median asking price.  If you look carefully,  you will see that the St. Matthews market experienced a few highs, signified by the high points shown in gold, which is the trend line measurement.  And with the highs, came some lows.  It is interesting that the highs, and lows, are not quite as symmetric as I would have guessed, with the high point in asking prices happening at the same time each year.  Instead, they are a few months off, with the high point of 2010 for St. Matthews homes in Louisville coming in January, while in 2009, the high water mark was in April.

Price alone doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about the St. Matthews real estate market in Louisville.  It is also important to look at some other data, such as time on the market, inventory levels, etc… to get a better idea of the whole market.  The graph above takes all of the data, plus much more, into account to derive what we call the “Median Market Action Index”, which is just a fancy way of asking “How’s the market?”  The higher the number on the graph above, the closer to a seller’s market we are, and the lower the number, the closer we are to a buyer’s market.  If you are selling your house in St Matthews, you probably want to see a value around 30 or higher, which is where the seller’s market range is.  30 marks a neutral market, so anything below that value shows a buyer’s market.  As you can see from the graph, the market action index for the St. Matthews real estate market was right at 20, solidly in the buyer’s market range.  As of this past week, the number had dropped to about 16, even further into a depressed market.

The sellers of this Louisville St Matthews home for sale have decided that is time to reduce the asking price by $10,000, down to $189,900!  This home is in great shape with many recent renovations, including a new kitchen, great floors and a redone bathroom.  The home also has a full basement and is in a great neighborhood in Louisville, right in the middle of the St Matthews real estate market.

In just the past year, single family homes for sale in 40207 have seen quite a wide range of how long they have stayed on the market.  Last June or July, Louisville St Matthews homes for sale were averaging under 110 days on market.  From there, things looked pretty bleak as data points continued to rise, week after week, until earlier this year the measurement rose as high as 195 days.  But since that time, trends seem to have reversed, and now days on market numbers are falling, with last weeks measurement coming in at 135 days.  Perhaps on the next article I write about days on market, I will pull in data from further back, so we can see if this recent up and down is cyclical, or shows some kind of unique circumstance for the St. Matthews area.

The number of homes for sale in St. Matthews Ky is now about 50% higher than it was just five or six months ago, in January of 2010!  The latest weekly measurement shows a data point of about 232 single family homes for sale in 40207 with a trend line measurement of 217 or so.  But just one year ago, in the midst of one of the worst markets ever, so we were told, there were less than 200 homes available for sale in the St Matthews Ky real estate market.  Now, if last year was a horrible market, and there were almost 200 homes available, what does that say about our current market that we are well above that number of homes currently available?

At the very beginning of 2010, the median asking price of Louisville St Matthews homes for sale had weekly measurements around $325,000 and a trending line around $312,000.  But since that time, the values have really fallen, with a median asking price as low as $270,000 for single family homes in 40207, before rebounding a bit to $280,000 as of last week’s measurement.  That small increase in the asking prices has been enough to bend the trend line, shown in gold, and may be signaling the bottom of the market and shows that we might actually be ready to see an increase in asking prices for homes for sale in the Louisville St Matthews real estate market.

For the past year, there has been a fairly consistent gap between the asking price of homes already on the market and listings already on the market for the Louisville St Matthews real estate market.  At no point during the past 12 months have new listings had a higher median asking price than the group of listings already on the market.  This time last year the difference between the two groups of homes was close to $25,000.  That difference rose to as high as $35,000 and recently has gotten to as low as the current difference of $10,000.  It is encouraging to see that the median price of new listings of homes for sale in St Matthews has been closing the gap lately, indicating a strengthening market.