The Oahu real estate statistics were released today and I'm sure people all over are scouring them to see which way the market is going. There are a bunch of numbers that indicate no change - median price was $595k for homes, $312k for condos. Average days on market was 46 for homes, 56 for condos. 265 homes sold, and 327 condos sold. Pretty flat on all those.
But 2 of the statistics look very promising: Total Inventory and Months of inventory remaning. These numbers, while they sound similar, show different things. The total inventory shows how many homes for sale (duh) and months of inventory is much more important, because it tells us how long it would take to sell all those homes. Even if inventory was low, there were very low sales, it could take years to sell those homes.
There were a total of 1653 homes for sale and 2279 condos for sale. Those were the lowest numbers all year, and the lowest number of homes for sale since April 2006!
When you divide that by the number of sale, you get only 6.5 months of homes available. In contrast, back in February there were 15.8 months of homes! In any market, if you have less than 6 months of homes available, it's considered a seller's market. Now I'm not willing to go that far, but check this out, about 3 weeks ago I listed a house in Hahaione and got 9 offers all well over asking. Why? Because THERE WAS NOTHING GOOD FOR SALE in that area at a reasonable price.
Have we reached or surpassed the bottom of the market? I said it in March and I still think so.