May House Trends Show a Lag for Available Inventory, Yet Remain Strong For Sales Numbers

As Spring slowly moves into early summer, house buyers hit the pavement looking for available homes in Bend, Oregon. Normally during this time of year, sellers will be cleaning out homes and packing things away as they will be slamming the market with available residential real estate. This trend has been the norm for years, and has been come to seen as the traditional mindset for sellers who want to get their properties noticed on the listings.

Yet surprisingly, this tradition isn’t the case this year. The Duke Warner Realty May Trend Report shows that instead of our inventory growing from February into May, it has been decreasing over several different price ranges. There has been a significant increase in buyer demand, but there simply aren’t enough listings to fill this demand. This decrease in available inventory has been consistent over the last 4 months.

Highest Price Category Has the Most Inventory

Interestingly enough, it is the highest price category of $625,100 and up that has seen the most inventory enter the Bend real estate market in May. To date, there were 154 active listings recorded on May 1st as it is up from the 120 active listings featured during the month of April. With such a large amount of inventory hitting this market segment, sellers should be careful with their pricing and pay close attention to the market to get their homes noticed and sold without having the property sit for too long.

When reviewing the active listings for the same time period, the price category of $325,100 to $425,000 has the second most active inventory of 82 listings. This figure has decreased from the April 1st to April 30th time period where there were 85 active listings.

The remaining price categories show similar lower inventory trends: 72 active listings for $225,100 to $325,000 price range; 51 active listings for $425,100 to $525,00 price range; 47 active listings for $525,100 to $625,000 price range; and 1 active listing for $125,000 to $225,000 range. While there was an increase in new listings, this increase has not had a significant impact on inventory.

Strong Sales Still Dominate in Bend

Yet the Bend, Oregon real estate market is still going on strong, which remains the dominate trend. The most desired price range for home buyers — in the $325k to $425k category — has shown incredible, overall strong pending sales throughout April. There are 86 pending sales in this price range. Taking a look at the overall totals, there were 323 pending sales when combining all price categories, as April outpaced every other month for the previous 10 years.

Final Analysis

The current May real estate trends are not typical for this time of year. We wouldn’t normally see such low inventory and high sales so early in the year as we would expect this to happen in the near future. Yet, overall, we continue to have a robust market activity that could change in the following weeks if more sellers decide to place their properties out on the market.

To keep track of the current real estate trends that are happening in Bend, Oregon, turn to Duke Warner Realty as we compile comprehensive market data that is available to home sellers and buyers. Find out what we can do for you when you are interested in buying or selling real estate by visiting dukewarner.com, browsing our Facebook page, or calling us at (541) 382-8262.