Home Sales Up 7th Straight Month

The number of homes sold has been up every month since June when compared to the previous year, and the total number of homes sold is up by 5,389 homes over 2007, which is an increase of nearly 9.5%. This is a good sign indicating buyers are starting to come back into the market. You can see a large change in the number of buyers in the 4th quarter of 2007 vs the 4th quarter of 2008. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean we're close to being out of the woods yet. The number of homes on the market is still nearly 57,000 and we currently have a 10 month supply of homes. Until the current inventory drops significantly and gets closer to the 30,000 homes on the market number, we're going to continue to see delcines in home prices. I will have the median home prices out next week as well as the annual summary.

I couldn't get the entire chart to fit, so please click the image at the beginning of this post for all 12 months gonig back to 2001.

Home Sales Per Month
	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
2,005	8,046	7,350	6,549	106,730
+/-	-2,447	-2,013	-1,138	-30,238
change	-30.41%	-27.39%	-17.38%	-28.33%
2,006	5,599	5,337	5,411	76,492
+/-	-2,142	-2,019	-1,991	-19,662
change	-38.26%	-37.83%	-36.80%	-25.70%
2,007	3,457	3,318	3,420	56,830
+/-	1,932	1,094	2,197	5,389
change	55.89%	32.97%	64.24%	9.48%
2,008	5,389	4,412	5,617	62,219

The first line is the actual number of homes to sell in the given month, followed by the difference in sales of the following year and the percentage change.