If you are interested in the Prospect Ky real estate market, how you look at the graph below probably depends upon whether or not you are an optimist or a pessimist.  An optimist will look and notice that our current DOM measurement for homes for sale in Prospect is well down from just a few months ago.  And as proof, may even point out that our current number of 192 days is way better than March and April’s numbers that were closer to 250.  But the pessimist will point out that Prospect homes for sale were on the market only 160 days this time last year and we are now a full month worse off!

So who’s right?  The optimist or the pessimist?  I’m afraid there is not a quick answer.  But by looking at more than one set of data will often paint a more complete picture.  So, while we are talking about the DOM measurement for homes for sale in Prospect Ky, let’s also look at the Median number, and see how that compares to the Average, shown above.  And just in case you have forgotten, the Median measures the point at which half of the homes for sale in Prospect take longer than a certain number of days to leave the market, with the other half taking a shorter amount of time.

The shape of the two graphs is the same, but you can see that the scale is a bit different.  This should not be too surprising for Prospect Ky homes for sale, which tend to be more expensive than most other parts of town.  As a result, you would expect them to take longer to sell, on average.  But when you look at the median, you see that half of all homes for sale in Prospect are currently leaving the market after about 120 days.  But using the average, our measurement was just over 190 days!  Something else to point out, is that unlike the graph for the average DOM, today’s measurement for the median DOM is actually lower than at this point last year.

I believe the take away from the two graphs is that more expensive homes are staying on the market a really long time, and throw the averages way off, but if you look at the numbers on the median graph,  you may get a better idea of where you might stand, if you are thinking about selling your Prospect Ky home.

Even with a slight drop in last week’s measurement of the number of homes for sale in Prospect Ky, the overall trend is clear, inventory levels seem to be rising, and are actually higher today than they were at this time last year.  Last year, there were about 265 homes for sale in Prospect, depending a bit if you are looking at weekly data points, or the rolling trend line for 40059.  Either way, measurements this past week show higher values for both methods, and values are way up for Prospect Ky if you compare to earlier this year when the number of homes for sale had dropped to year long lows.

It’s easy to see that the overall inventory level is rising for Prospect Ky homes for sale, but every once in a while I like to go a bit further inside the numbers to further explain the situation.  In the graph below, I have two lines, one measuring how many homes for sale are entering the market any given week, as well as how many homes are leaving the market, due either to being sold, or simply homes being taken off the market (think either a cancellation of the listing contract, or expiration of the listing contract).  This time last year, the two values were virtually identical, which would result in a flat number of homes for sale in the Prospect Ky real estate market.  And then, for about five months or so, more homes were coming off the market than were being listed for sale.  But that changed, in February or March, and then more homes were being added than were being subtracted from the overall inventory count.

The last week, or two, show a slight tightening of the two values, closing the gap.  Perhaps that is simply a simple variance in the Prospect Ky real estate market, or just maybe, it may be giving us a heads up that we are in a correcting pattern, with a leveling stage coming where our inventory level will be a bit more consistent.  In general, it is better for home owners, and sellers in particular, if there are fewer homes available on the market, which will then force buyers to pay higher prices, since there will be less competition.

Prospect Ky real estate has seen quite a bit more volatility in the past six months than in the preceding months.  But it appears that if you average out all of the weekly ups and downs for Prospect Ky homes for sale, you end up with a more stable graph, which is exactly what the gold line below shows us.  The gold line below is a trend line, generated by average many weekly data points each week, and then repeating.  Using the trend line, asking prices for single family homes that are for sale in 40059 started leveling out at $482,000, give or take, and we haven’t seen too much movement from there.

Prospect Ky homes for sale have seen their median asking price level out over the past several weeks, with just a few, very small, ups and downs thrown in to keep us on our toes.  For much of last fall and into winter, single family homes in Prospect were asking right around $500,000.  But since that time, asking prices have fallen a bit, hitting a year long low in April of just less than $470,000, before rebounding to our current level of $485,000.  The trend line, shown in gold, tells a longer term story of Prospect, and that value is resting at about $482,000.

As interested as most Prospect home owners are in asking prices, that is not the only data we should look at on periodically.  One more stat that I like is the Median Market Action Index, which is the collection of many different measurements combined into one value that we can then determine if we are in a buyers market or sellers market.  On this scale, a 30 would show a stable market, with everything below a 30 indicating a buyers market, with the lower the number, the stronger the buyers market.  On the other side, anything above a 30 would be a seller’s market, but that isn’t anything the Prospect Ky real estate market has to worry about any time soon!

As expected, Prospect Ky homes for sale show up with a pretty low measurement on the MAI scale.  One year ago, the gold line shows a value of just below 15, which is very much into the buyer’s market.  I know homes sellers in 40059 were hoping for a big improvement over the past 12 months, but looking at the trend line, the current MAI value is now about 13 or 14, below even last year’s number, and further into a buyer’s market, certainly not great news for home sellers in Prospect, but not bad at all for anyone interested in buying a home in Prospect Ky.

For the bulk of the past year, Prospect Ky homes for sale have seen their Days On Market measurement rise, and quite dramatically at that.  In June of 2009, the average home in Prospect was taking about 140 days before leaving the market, either due to a sale, or simply leaving the market without a sale, such as an expiration.  That number rose all the way to 250 days this past April, just eight weeks or so ago.  Since that time, there seems to be have been quite a shift in the Prospect Ky real estate market, with DOM measurements dropping suddenly, all the way down to 180 days in just a few short weeks.  Seems quite coincidental, doesn’t it, that the big drop happened after the termination of the Federal Tax Credit?  I don’t know yet what the connection is, but it seems too well times to merely be a fluke!

For much of the second half of 2009, the number of Prospect Ky homes for sale declined at a pretty good rate.  Starting last June, there were a little over 270 homes for sale in 40059.  But at the turn of the year, that number had dropped all the way to about 200.  The trend line never made it that low, but followed the same path.  However, over the past four or five months, the Prospect Ky real estate market has seen a steady number of homes entering the market.  These might be people who are trying to sell for the first time, or it may also be some of the people who gave up last fall, deciding they couldn’t sell over the Holidays, and now they have put their homes back on the market.  Whoever it is, there are now more homes for sale in Prospect than at this time last year.

The trend line on the graph below showing median asking prices for Prospect Ky homes for sale seems to have stalled a bit around $483,000.  The black line, showing weekly data points, has been bouncing around the last few weeks, but with only a couple large movements.  As a result, the gold line, which shows a trend line for the Prospect Ky real estate market, has been holding steady the last few measurements.  As one of the more concentrated markets for higher end homes, Prospect sometimes has a tendency to behave a bit differently than a few other areas I cover, such as St. Matthews, the Highlands, or the greater Louisville market.  As such, we will have to wait a bit longer to see if Prospect is going to follow those other areas and start seeing a pick up in the market, or if their higher prices will serve as a deterrent and keep the market flat or declining.

In the past few months, the difference in median asking price for homes for sale in Prospect Ky has widened, when you compare the group of listings that are already on the market against the group of listings coming on to the market in any given week.  In a bad market, it is not uncommon for sellers just entering the market to price their homes less than those already on the market.  Basically its competition, and new sellers have seen what homes are not selling for, so why not try a bit lower and try to find a buyer at that level?  But the gulf between new listings and existing listings in the Prospect Ky real estate market was a bit surprising to me.  In most other parts of town, new listings are inching up and approaching or surpassing existing listings for asking prices.  But not in Prospect.  The difference between the two groups of homes for sale now stands at a bit over $50,000!

In the past year, the number of homes for sale in Prospect Ky has not crossed the 290 barrier.  But we are knocking on it’s door.  This week, one or two homes left the market place, leaving approximately 287 available units on the Prospect real estate market, just shy of the 290 mark.  Even though we are short of 290, it still appears that by dropping a bit from last week, we are now looking at the 2nd highest inventory level of the past year, behind only last week!  Additionally, if you look at the trend line, or 90 day inventory line, below, it has been rising steeply for the past few months, and it is going to take quite a turn around in the number of homes available for sale to be able to bend that line back down and bring the Prospect market back into some kind of equilibrium.

I’m at a bit of a loss here.  Prospect Ky homes for sale, like other areas around town, have seen a huge reduction in the average number of days that single family homes are staying on the market.  I can see the data below just as well as anyone, but I am having trouble figuring out why such a reduction would occur.  This is way too big of a drop to be a fluke, and I don’t think that it is a coincidence that it has happened so soon after the termination of the Federal Tax Credit program.  Looking at the graph below, it appears that the first or second measurement after the 1st  of May is when the big drop occurred.  The best guess I have right now is that many sellers, especially those who have had their homes on the market for a long time, simply got tired of trying to sell.  And when the tax credit ran out, they simply figured they had missed their best chance to sell and took their home off the Prospect Ky real estate market.

As the title of this short post states, the most recent measurement of median asking prices for single family homes in Prospect Ky shows four straight weeks of rising values, from just below $470,000 to the most recent market of about $487,000, give or take a bit.  This is still about 2.5% below last year’s values at this point, but markedly better than just one month ago, so I guess you take the bad with the good.  While I don’t really believe the Federal Tax Credit made a big difference for homes in 40059, since they are generally higher priced and less influenced by the relatively small tax break, I will be interested in seeing how the market responds once the tax credit effect is no longer in play.  Do we expect prices to keep rising a bit, stagnant, or maybe even drop a bit in the coming weeks and months?

A lot has been said recently, in newspapers and by real estate agents, about how strong last month’s sales numbers were.  And while I believe that this past April saw more sales than we have seen in other recent months, I would like to point out a few statistics from the Prospect Ky real estate market that don’t paint quite as rosy a picture.  For instance, the graph I have included below shows the number of Prospect Ky homes for sale.  Yes, there are fewer homes on the market this week than last week, but that only means that as of today, we are at the second highest level of homes for sale in the past year instead of the absolute highest.  Wow, some accomplishment.  In fact, both the trend line and the data points are higher today than at this point last year.  So while April sales may have been strong, that alone doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods in terms of real estate.