New tool on the blog and a new market update ..

months ago after becoming disillusioned by a lot of bad information being spread across the web I started digging up real data and crunching some numbers myself to see if others were telling you the real story or simply pedaling some worn out company advertising aimed to mislead people into buying something so that they might profit. Along those same lines, I have added a new tool to the top of this blog that allows visitors to instaneously see the number of months of active real estate inventory in Garrett County. This calculation, much like the numbers reported nationally by the NAR, is the result of dividing the current active inventory by the previous month's sales volume. The result is the number of months it would take to exhaust current inventory at the previous month's sale pace assuming no new properties come to the market and no current listings are pulled from the market before a sale is made. Easy enough right?

Over time, users will be able to see how this number fluctuates or moves up and down, thus giving one indication as to whether the market is improving or not. In October 2006, when the local market was much stronger, this number was about 11.5 and considerably lower than the current 20 shown at the top of the page. May 2008 offered a similar big increase over May 2007 as I previously reported in another Garrett County market update.

And finally just for comparison sake here is a table of active inventory by month for all of 2006-2008:



The general trend has definitely been up (particularly in the same months of different years), but as always this will bear watching, so stay tuned. Perhaps people have finally realized that the Deep Creek market is oversaturated and inventory levels are finally leveling off in reponse. Since we know that these types of trends don't change overnight, it looks like it could be another long winter for those who are hoping to be sellers in the Deep Creek market. Gradually though things will improve .. eventually they have to.

Don't forget to check back to Dan's Deep Creek Blog for future updates.