Portland real estate inventory nearly doubled in January.  Inventory is a ratio of closed sales and active listings.  3937 new listings were taken in January compared to 2104 in December and closed sales declined compared to the previous month pushing inventory up.  Between December 2008/January 2009 inventory increased 36% and this year’s Dec/Jan increase was 67%.  In the next couple of days I’ll go back through previous years and take a look what Dec/Jan has looked like historically [percentages corrected 2.18.10].

The highlight graph doesn’t tell us a lot by itself so I’ve added December’s here as well.  Median and average price is down.  What can’t be seen and will take some research, if it possible to glean at all, is whether listing prices have come down.  From what we are seeing, properties coming on the market are more appropriately priced for the market.