Lately I’ve been using the inventory numbers from housingtracker.net. Today Schahrzad quietly pointed out that the actual inventory count is different everywhere you look.
Here’s how the San Diego Inventory is being reported:
Zip Realty is showing 12,691 homes for sale in San Diego County.
Housingtracker shows 16,501 SFH+condos for sale this week, “derived from online listings”.
Redfin is showing 17,266 homes for sale, with 142 for-sale-by-owners, but it’s their count for May.
Sandicor MLS shows 11,446 actives, split between 7,758 detached, and 3,688 attached homes for sale. Do with it what you will, and I’ll attempt to set up a way to track the inventory here.
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BMIT was the best at it – ocrenter we miss you! Here is the last SD County chart from BMIT, for historical comparison:
Comparing July numbers are interesting, if we have around 3,000 detached and attached sales this month, we’ll be about the same as July 2006, and 2007, with substantially fewer actives to sell.
Here are the current MLS stats for detached and attached homes in SD County:
ACT: 11,446
CONT: 4,285
PEND: 5,148
SOLD: 2,902 (June, 2010 – 1,873 det, 1,029 att)
SOLD: 16,278, $244/sf (Jan-June 2010)
SOLD: 16,289, $216/sf (Jan-June, 2009)
The number of sales are nearly identical year-over-year, while the average $/sf increased 13%. Sellers really have no excuse for not selling; market conditions are good if there are almost as many contingent and pendings as there are active listings. What are the differences between the reporting websites? I’m not sure, maybe they include contingents and FSBOs? We could add 2-4 units (431 active listings) and mobile/modular (779) and still only get 12,656 from the MLS, similar to ziprealty.com.
I would definitely only rely on the hard data provided by your MLS. Third party databases/vendors just don’t have the position/authority with which to give official stats.
Jim, this is getting more interesting.
I think housingtracker gets its data from Realtor.com. If you go to realtor.com and check the dozens of boxes to get all of San Diego County, you are right on housingtracker’s #s.
Agents know Realtor.com is the most unreliable listing site. They let agents put in their own listings, and leave them on forever, just so they can keep getting calls from potential buyers. I had no idea there were 5000 old listings on there.
There are so many pending and sold listings, that remain as Active on realtor.com.
But the trend is correct. Inventory has been heading up all year. Bob Casagrand says inventory is going up because of fewer expired, cancelled, and withdrawn listings.