America's Worst-Selling Housing Markets
America's Worst-Selling Housing Markets
By Matt Woolsey, Forbes.com
Apr 24th, 2008
Miami-area home sellers looking to unload their properties might want to make sure they have comfortable couches.
It looks like they're going to be there a while.
That's because Miami tops our list of the nation's most sedentary housing markets. These 10 spots feature a potent mix of dropping prices and sluggish sales rates. Also on the list: Denver, San Diego, Baltimore and Chicago.
In compiling our list, we looked at price growth and sales rates in the country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas. We took the cities in the midst of year-over-year price declines, based on National Association of Realtors data, then calculated how quickly these cities are shedding inventory from their peaks, which occurred between four and six months ago, based on data from ZipRealty, an aggregator of multiple listing service data. Atlanta, a likely contender for the top ten, was not considered due to irregularities in inventory reporting.
By using sales rate, instead of the months remaining of inventory, we wind up with a figure that shows how quickly homes have been leaving the market from its most saturated point, the most straightforward indicator for measuring sedentary vs. active sales.
In Chicago, for example, where the median home sale price in the fourth quarter of 2007 was $261,000, a 2.6% drop from the previous year, there were 72,842 homes on the market, with 2.2% of them selling each month.
While this sales rate alone isn't extraordinary, it matters because Chicago's housing supply is overstocked, with 50% more houses on the market than two years ago. Prices, as a result, are continuing to sink.
Behind The Numbers
It's important to note that housing markets never contract to zero inventory. Their inventory cushions also differ. From 2002 to 2006, New York had an average unsold inventory rate of 1.7%. But another healthy market during that time, Charlotte, N.C., maintained a 2.9% unsold housing inventory rate.
"Every market is a little bit different," says Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a Manhattan-based real estate appraisal company. "But while faster sales don't necessarily mean a bottom is around the corner, it is a significant reversal." That's because prices typically go up after inventory goes down.
Another important point is that the country's most sedentary housing markets are not the ones with free-falling prices.
Some of the country's more active markets are Las Vegas and Sacramento, Calif., where houses are moving off the listing pages at monthly rates of 3.4% and 4.2%, respectively, from their peak inventory gluts.
But both those markets were dramatically overbuilt during the boom, and sales are largely a result of homeowners slashing prices. In Sacramento, 50% of area homes have been marked down from their original listing prices; it’s 48% in Las Vegas, according to ZipRealty.
Chicago-area sales are more sluggish, but even though prices have declined (they are down 2.6% for the year), they're nowhere near the double-digit falls seen in Las Vegas and Sacramento.
The markets that are really in trouble are those in Florida, which have experienced all the overbuilding and lending problems of Las Vegas and Sacramento but are experiencing flat sales. In September 2007 in Orlando, No. 2 on our list, there were 35,365 homes on the market. Since then, available inventory has shrunk at the excruciatingly slow monthly rate of 0.6% per month. It's the same story in Miami, where homes have been selling at an underwhelming rate of 0.2% per month.
Miller says there's generally a three to six month lag between when a city starts putting a serious dent into its inventory and when prices start to improve.
For these 10 markets, that moment can't come soon enough.
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