New Listings Up; Inventory Down

I received SMDRA’s 7 county MLS report last Wednesday and 3 things stood out to me. First, the number of new listings (7,154) was an increase of 7.2% from last May. Second, inventory at end of the month was just 5,439 homes and condos for sale, down 5.6% from last year and down 11.3% from May 2016. Buyers still greatly outnumber sellers. Third, it was intriguing to see average prices drop in May from April as the overall average price dropped by about $2,000. This might have happened because April’s month over month increase was so big compared to March. Here are all the facts—
Last month buyers purchased 5,299 homes and condos, down 3.7% from last May, but up 6% from May 2016.
Homeowners newly listed 7,154 properties last month, an increase of 7.2% from last May and an increase of 10.9% from 2016.
Buyers placed 5,699 properties under contract last month, a 2% increase from last May and a tiny 0.1% increase from May 2016.
The average sales price last month of all properties sold was $479,085, an increase of 10.3% from last May
Average attached home prices rose by 13% to $353,709
Average detached home prices rose by 9.1% to $526,811
The median sales price last month of all properties sold was $416,500, an increase of 9.6% from last May
Median attached home prices rose by 13.7% to $302,500
Median detached home prices rose by 8% to $448k.
The Sales to List Price Ratio last month was 100.8%
We ended the month with just 5,439 properties for sale.
This puts months of inventory at 1.03 months!!!
Median CDOM remained at 5 days.
We don’t see Median CDOM rise above 30 days until the $2 million price point!
Average CDOM dropped to 27 days last month vs 29 days last May.

Here is the number of active listings for sale at the end of May for the previous few years and we are still going in the wrong direction.
2014—7,764
2015—6,106
2016—6,129
2017—5,761
2018—5,439

Even with over 7,000 new listings last month our inventory levels dropped. Amazing!!! We need inventory levels to increase by about 250% for us to see price increases of only 5-6% a year.