Bad blogger, bad blogger. When you realize your last post was March’s RMLS Market Action report and April’s came out two days ago it’s time to start typing. So here we go. There’s no real surprise the inventory is low. At 3.1 months that mean that if we stopped taking new listings, the 6498 listings would be gone just over three months at the current rate of sales. That’s a Metro Portland number so you’re going to find some variation in more localized areas: North Portland has 2.5 months, NE Portland 2.1 months, SE Portland 2.6 months and West Portland 2.1 months of inventory.
Inventory is a based on the rate of closings which is up 16.4% from 2012 and the number of new listings which is also up 4.4% compared to last year. It doesn’t take much of a memory to remember when we had 19.2 months of inventory!
We’ve seen a 15.3% increase in average sales price from a year ago. We’ve proven that the market can not sustain double digit grown but we will see some downward pressure on that when the Oregon Supreme Court rules on the legality of MERS (electronic mortgage transfers), If they rule in the banks’ favor, they will revert to the quicker non-judicial foreclosures. If the court rules in the plaintiff’s favor the judicial foreclosure process that is already taking place will eventually run its course and those, usually lower priced, homes will come to market. Either way, bank owned foreclosures have not gone away; they’re stuck in the system. I don’t believe that banks are holding sell-able inventory from the market.
