Portland Real Estate Market Conditions June 2010

Where’s the bottom of the Portland real estate market? Are home prices going to continue to fall or are they stabilizing?

These are great questions. Determining answers is tricky. We’ll only know the bottom of the market when we see it in the rear view mirror. But there are definite signs of stabilization.

To compare with last month check my previous market conditions blog.

Homes are starting to sell faster and for slightly more money than they had been. This is good news. We see this in two sets of real estate statistics. Let’s look first at real estate home prices for sold homes with our latest market figures. June 2010’s average sales price was 3.3% lower than June 2009’s. But it’s up 2.4% over January 2010’s average sold price. In addition the total market time (a loose basis for how long homes take to sell) was 121 days in June, 145 days in January 2010 and 147 days in June of 2009.

The months of inventory (see chart below) is a measure of whether the real estate market favors buyers or sellers. While we’re still in a slight buyer’s market with 7.3 months of inventory last month, this is way better than January 2009’s 19.2 months of inventory.

Is it a buyers market or a seller’s market? See the chart below.

It’s all based on the number of months of inventory. How many months would it take to sell all the homes currently on the market if no new property came up for sale? Less than 4 months inventory is a sellers market; 4-6 months is a neutral market; and more than 6 months inventory is a buyers market. All information is courtesy of RMLS.