With 2010 wrapping up, there may be no better time to glimpse back and reflect at just how really putrid the Louisville real estate marketplace has become and how terrible the future looks for Louisville households on the market!

As opposed to going through all sorts of information, I desire to look at only two charts right now. The very first will likely be for asking prices and also the second will be inventory levels of real estate actively in the marketplace within the city of Louisville. I will not be looking at surrounding counties, and this data doesn't consist of sold homes, multi-family units or condominiums, just single family homes for sale in Jefferson County.

I'll begin with asking prices, the dollar amount that residence sellers are placing on their listings when they're in the marketplace and hoping to locate a buyer. Usually, when we have a decent market, you would expect small increases in prices. So that when we compare residence prices in December of 2010 to December of 2009, we would usually want to see a modest rise. And if we look even further back than this past year, we'd anticipate to see an even bigger increase.

But that's not the case in our current environment! Our costs nowadays are lower than they had been in both 2009 and 2008. Ouch. And that holds true for weekly information points recorded over the past two years as well as trend lines over the same period. At this point in 2008, weekly information points show a value of about $149,000 for a median asking price. My most recent measurement now shows a median price of $145,000, a $4,000 drop in two years. As opposed to increasing residence values, we have truly seen an almost 3% drop!

To drive the point house further, if we pick virtually any date, and look backwards, we will see that our 2010 values are well off previous measurements. For instance, let's look at median asking prices of Louisville homes for sale on July 1st for every of the past two years. In 2010, home prices had been $155,000 on the very first day of July. One year earlier, asking costs had been at $169,000. For the percentage lovers out there, that's over an 8% drop in one calendar year. How about choosing a date inside the springtime, like the first day in April? In 2010, information shows median asking costs at $154,000 compared to $160,000 in 2009.

OK, so now I've identified that asking prices of Louisville homes have not been spectacular the past two years. It is time to move on to inventory levels of homes for sale. Back in December of 2008, there had been roughly 3,750 single family homes for sale in the city of Louisville, according to recorded information points. That amount increased to a higher level of over 5,300 earlier this 12 months prior to dropping back to the most up-to-date measurement of approximately 4,300 available units.

I suppose you might argue that we have observed a significant decrease of number of homes on the market, since we dropped about 1,000 properties within the past nine or ten months. But that ignores the fact that we already have far more homes for sale than we did at this time last year and also the year before.

If you're an objective individual, you've got to take a look at the information and recognize that our prices are lower now than at this time in either of the two preceding years, and at the exact same time, we have more homes available on the market at this time than either of the two preceding years. Obviously, this is not the sign of a recovering market, but rather an indication that we still have plenty of houses to get and equity to restore before we can say our marketplace has rebounded.