Courtney Stuart has a very good article in this week’s HooK. Not that she needs it, but she deserves credit for presenting an accurate, non-threatening/non-emotional picture of the current real estate market in the Charlottesville/Albemarle region.

“There’s an awful lot of inventory,” says real estate agent Jim Duncan, who analyzes the house-for-sale scene on his blog, realcentralva.com. Indeed, at the end of  April, more than 1,100 properties were listed on the market in Charlottesville and Albemarle. By May 29– Hook press time– the number had soared to over 1,400. That’s about 600 more than at the same time in the hot market of 2005.

Making the picture even darker for sellers: average days on market in April was 120, up from just 66 days in April 2005, when sales were blazing. More than twice the inventory, and nearly twice as long to sell it. But Duncan insists those ominous numbers don’t spell doom.

In CharlAlbemarle –

2004 residential properties have been listed since the first of the year. Of those, 663 have gone under contract, or one-third. Spun negatively, 2/3 of the properties that have come on the market this year are still on the market . Taking the list date out of the equation, 1088 residential properties have gone under contract so far this year (just in Charlottesville/Albemarle)

There is more accumulated inventory in the market right now. Properties are selling, but at a slower rate that we are used to.

* NB: for the month of May, I went only to the 30th rather than 31st for consistency’s sake.
* NB: all residential properties are included, including condos.

** big note: In this PDF showing inventory history, “Current Inventory” is apparently defined as Active and Contingent properties. When I ran the above numbers, I omitted the Contingent properties.

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