I’ve also noticed inventory going up since Easter. And very little selling.
If the trend continues, we could see the pile-up starting soon.

I check the inventory numbers on 12 Seattle neighborhoods through the week. Normally, they’ve each had a lot of up and down activity with a good amount of sell-off on Saturdays.

This week the numbers went up up up each day and only 2 neighborhoods decreased today- by just one property each!

That’s a pretty solid “hold” pattern. The next few weeks will be interesting for us number-watchers.

You are right, the graph portrays asking, not selling price.

And as has been noted in several places on this blog, and can be verified by anyone who bothers to check county tax records, most properties are selling UNDER asking price. Very few are being bid up.

And now we wait for your few examples of the properties in your immediate neighborhood that sold over asking.

I’m sure they will follow shortly.

Their are two problems, however.

The one you already mentioned is that they are tracking asking, not selling price. Useful, if used cautiously.

The other is that there is seasonality to inventory, and I don’t feel comfortable comparing April to October, unless you adjust for that seasonal trend.

I think inventory is up a bit if you compare to April 05.

Still interesting though…

There’s no other way you could get weekly stats like that.

Median Price for 4/21/06: $424,990

Inventory for 4/21/06: 3,382

That’s 9.5% INCREASE in price over the last 7 months and a 13.8 percent DECREASE in inventory..wow!

See the full report Here.

From:

rumors-myths-and-conspiracies.blogspot.com/

Inventory Graph

Price Graph

Inventory graphs are interpreted as follows: The blue line represents total housing inventory as listed in ziprealty.com. The green line depicts the total number of homes sold in the previous month. The red line depicts the total number of homes added to the market in the previous thirty days.

Price graphs represent asking prices and should be interpreted as follows: The red line represents the 75th percentile. Seventy five percent of home sellers are asking for less than this amount, and only twenty five percent are asking for more. The purple line represents the median asking price. Half of those selling homes are asking for more and half for less than this price. The blue line represents the 25th percentile. Twenty five percent have an asking price which is less than this amount.

Looks like inventory hasn’t changed much over the past few months, put prices have been edging up slighty.

Fed only controls the prime rate, but incluences the shorter term rates more than long term.

I believe it also said that the Fed has no control over the long term rates.

Could someone please hire a state economist who knows that loan rates are more closely tied to the T-bill yield (which only recently started to rise) than the reserve’s short-term rates?

Please?

See it here

The unfortunate part of this is the state is starting to get used to this artificial tax base created from the housing bubble and when the show’s over, and all those unemployed construction workers line up for unemployment benefits and there’s a run on the rainy-day fund in the state, what then?