February Real Estate Statistics Not So Good

The Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors released their February real estate statistics which the Star reported on today, and it isn’t the rosiest picture. Just about everywhere, in both new homes and existing homes, sales prices were down from a year ago (all data compared with Feb. 07). And all the reports you hear about a “slow” market are true too because the total number of sales was also down from a year ago.

Did you know that if you want to buy a house in the greater Kansas City area, you would have 19,094 homes to choose from? Unfortunately, that is still more than we had on the market a year ago, but the increase is seen only in existing home inventory, and not in new home inventory. There are 10% more existing homes on the market, compared with 18% less newly constructed homes on the market than a year ago due to the relative halt of new construction. The new home market is really badly suffering – much more so than existing home market. They are selling at a much slower pace than existing homes, plus there is a 16-month supply of new homes on the market, as compared with 8.5 months for existing homes. Real Estate experts will tell you that anything over a 6 month supply of homes constitutes a “buyer’s market”.

I always like to compare the big picture with a smaller area, so I checked the number of sales in area code 64113, which is Brookside, and there were just about twice as many sales last February as there were this February. Slow… ugh!

Hopefully the numbers will improve over the Spring and Summer months. Stay tuned!