Weekly Special | October 21, 2019

The New Normal Is Abnormal

One could argue that markets never sit on normal conditions, and nothing supports this argument better than a graph of the percent of inventory selling each month.

The graph above plots the percentage of listings that sell each month (red dots measured on the right vertical axis). The red field has been considered the “normal range”

for the past thirty years that I have been selling homes in Tallahassee.

I’ve only been collecting data on this since 2008, so we’re basically looking at twelve years worth of information, but it says a lot.

During the housing market crash and recovery from 2007 through 2015, we saw lower than normal sales percentages. This means that supply was higher than demand and as little as 3% of homes listed for sale were actually selling in any given month.

But times change. Now we’re typically seeing more than a quarter of all listings sell each month, and even had a month soar where more than 1/3rd of the inventory sold.

This means that demand is now higher than supply and the inventory is turning-over much more quickly than what has been seen as normal.

Of course, these numbers shake out differently across our area and price ranges in the market, so use more specific information when selling.

The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.