At Home in Upland

Available Home Inventory In My Little Corner of the World.

It's been tough for some of us to find properties matching our buyers wish list. Not that they don't exist, but rather that the number of homes on the market is low, and when we did similar searches several years ago, a REALTOR(R) could count on the matching home being in reasonable turnkey condition. Today, almost 60% of the home inventory is distressed and often in the "fixer" category.

One of the understandings widely accepted in the industry is that six months of inventory is pretty much the balance point between a buyer's and seller's market. More than six months presents abundant inventory so that buyers have choices of homes... thus, indicating a "buyers market". Below six months and the sellers have the upper hand and the buyer is presented fewer choices. The "take-it-or-leave-it" mentality is more frequently seen by the sellers. Certainly there are some variables for those sellers under the gun to sell, but in any case "months of Inventory" is one indicator of the health of a market. Again, I caution that all "Real Estate Is Local", so national, statewide or even county numbers are meaningless.

So how is this calculated? Looking at inventory numbers is like looking at a photograph. The camera captures what was happening at that very instant. The scene undoubtedly changed after the picture was taken. And so any look at inventory.... it was what the numbers indicated at any one point in time, and the numbers changed thereafter.... is for that instant that the numbers were captured (April 30th). We know how many homes are actively available for sale, and we know how many homes sold that month, so , dividing the number of available homes by the number sold gives us a rough number of how many months of inventory (absorption rate) we had at that point in time. By looking at this calculation every month we can see whether we are moving towards more or less inventory. It's an indicator to be followed.

Here are the Inventory numbers captured by city at the end of last month for My Little Corner of the World:

These numbers DECLINED for Upland, Claremont, Chino and Pomona. Inventory INCREASED in Fontana, Ontario, Chino Hills, Corona and La Verne. For a look at all of the April stats for these communities, follow this link.

This has been a look at the Available Home Inventory In My Little Corner of the World.