Home sales best previous year for 7 straight months; active listings still needed

 

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Charts of Louisville home sales and Louisville home prices for 12-month period ending August 2015.

For the month of August, there were 1,047 properties sold in Jefferson County. As it turns out, there were also 1,047 properties sold in August 2014. That’s consistent performance, right there.

After seven straight months of besting the previous year when it came to Louisville home sales, this past month we ended in a tie. A dead heat. A photo finish.

Not that this isn’t a strong performance. We have to go all the way back to 2007 to find an August where more houses exchanged hands.

Below are Jefferson County’s August sales totals going back to 2002.

2002       872
2003       956
2004     1,012
2005     1,170
2006     1,153
2007     1,060
2008       787
2009       803
2010       617
2011       766
2012     1,029
2013     1,128
2014     1,047
2015     1,047

Our current sales activity is about 70 percent higher than it was during the low point of the housing recession.

Changing gears, we’ll take a look at home prices. Tracking the median sales price gives a bit more regularity than the average, which is helpful when sample sizes are smaller. Here our sample size is quite large — either value is useful, so I’ll share both.

The median home sales price for August was $157,500. This is up 1.6 percent from a year ago but down from its high of $161,700 in May.

Our average Jefferson County sale price was $199,869, which is 4.8 percent higher than last year’s mark. Expect both metrics to decline as we enter into the fall and, even more so, during the winter months.

The biggest Louisville real estate news of the year continues to be the lack of listings. Our market is down 21.9 percent in active listings compared to the same month last year. Imagine what sales totals could have been this summer had we been holding a balanced market.