Since we didn’t go live on the air for the 4th of July show I wanted to post some market number updates on the site for all you die hard housing statistic junkies (hopefully there’s only a few of you).  It’s pretty much “song remains the same” as we drifted into the end of June and what was originally the final end to the tax credit.  Here are the 3 key numbers from the past week, as we report every week:

New Listings: 1,712 which is down 8.4% from one year ago

New Pending Sales: 645 which is down 44.2% from last year at this time.

Total Number of Active Listings: 27,234 which is up 1.4% from this same week last year.

What does this mean?  Well the new listings and new pending sales numbers actually both dipped slightly from the week before.  So that means the rate of new homes coming onto the market and those leaving the market (because they have been sold) stayed about the same.  That is good news in terms of steadying home values.

But, this week marked only the second time all year that total active listings increased above 27,000.  The only other week was the last week push before the tax credit expiration date on April 30th.  Because this number increased while the other two were down a bit it means we had less “run off” than normal.  “Run off” refers to the number of homes that drop out of the active market for whatever reason.  The risk is that if this run off rate continues to slow we will see the overall inventory of homes continue to grow.  A larger inventory of homes for sale puts pressure on home prices to drop, meaning the value of your home goes down whether you are looking to sell it right now or not.

My guess is that the slight uptick in overall homes for sale had to do with short sale deals that didn’t come together and so they stayed as active listings.  Probably nothing to get too concerned about.  But, as we have been saying quite regularly now–hopefully we don’t sound like a broken record–we will have to keep watching these numbers to get a sense of what will come this fall.  The risk, as it has been all year, is that the bank’s begin dumping their foreclosure inventory into the market which would drop prices further.  Given that they have shown restraint from doing this so far this year, we do not expect to see this happen.  Hopefully we are right or prices will drop another 10-20% before the end of the year.

Be sure to listen to us this Sunday from 2-3 pm on MyTalk 107.1 FM when we will be back on the air with a live new show.