In today’s Daily Data Discussion we’ve chosen to remain focused on the single family world for another couple of days, and will start with a look at markets with the largest inventories of unsold single family homes and condos. 

A couple of days ago we mentioned what a challenge it can be to get accurate median single family home sale price from agencies responsible for collecting and analyzing the data.  As you’d readily reason there are lot of markets that have experienced dramatic losses in single family home valuation, and it’s not the kind of news that some in the real estate industry wish to be readily available to the public at large. 

We find the same protective behavior among some markets’ real estate professionals with regard to discussion of absorption rates or the number of months of inventory of unsold homes and condos in their market.  This may be the single most difficult data point for our research teams to round up, and we have derived an algorithm to allow prediction of the value when hard information isn’t readily available. 

It should be noted that the value changes most often month to month, hence our preference to track unsold inventory in terms of quarterly data, and calculate 3-quarter, 6-quarter, and 9-quarter rolling averages to smooth the curve out a bit, and following trend changes a bit more readily. 

Here are the markets in our database with the largest 3-quarter rolling average of unsold single family home and condo inventories, expressed in the number of months to sell the supply of listed properties. 

1)  Miami, FL   33.1
2)  Ft. Lauderdale, FL  32
3)  Deltona-Daytona, FL  29.3
4)  Orlando, FL   20.7
5)  Pensacola, FL  20.6

Database Average:  8.8

Database Median:  7.7

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the markets around the country with the smallest inventories of unsold homes and condos. 

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