One of the complaints that I have heard frequently from people looking to buy in today’s market is that despite the near-record number of listings on the market today, much of what is on the market is inventory that has been sitting for months. That sounds like an invitation for a chart.
In the chart below I have taken 9,555 single-family homes on the market in King County (as of yesterday afternoon) and split them into four buckets based on how long they have been on the market. The “1 Month or Less” bucket is homes that have been listed for 1 to 30 days, the “1-3 Months” bucket is homes that have been listed for 31 to 90 days, and so forth.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a source that allowed me to download comprehensive data for the cumulative days on market for all homes (i.e. – if a home is delisted and subsequently relisted, the days keep counting), so non-cumulative days on market will have to suffice. Just keep in mind that in reality the whole chart is probably shifted noticeably to the right.
As of yesterday, two thirds of the homes on the market had been sitting for over 30 days, and forty percent of the homes had been on the market for over three months. It’s also worth pointing out that over 1,500 of the listings currently on the market are short sales, some of which may not be “stale,” but they’re certainly not what most buyers would consider to be a fresh interesting listing, either.
Another interesting bit of info I found when analyzing the data was that 328 homes (3.4% of the total) on the market have been sitting for over a year. At that point, why even pretend that you’re serious about selling?
The basic story that seems to be told by this data—especially when you consider that we’re not looking at the cumulative days on market—is that buyers complaining about stale listings are largely accurate. There are a lot of homes on the market, but much of that has been sitting around for quite some time.