Checking The Pulse Of The Kansas City Real Estate Market

The Home Buyer Credit ended the last day of April and since that time everyone with a stake in the real estate industry has been holding their breath in hopes that home sales would remain solid. However I’ve been concerned the past several weeks as web traffic, foot traffic and home inquiries have slowed. It was going to take a full month of market stats for me to analyze and be able to compare how our post-tax credit real estate market was doing. Well, the end of May has come, I’ve analyzed the stats,and the results aren’t  pretty.

The number of single-family Johnson County homes that went under contract in May 2010 was down roughly 60% when compared to April 2010.  The raw numbers are 1,138 homes going under contract from 4/1/10 through 4/30/10, compared to 438 homes going under contract 5/1/10 through 5/31/10. These figures give a clear indication that the end of the Home Buyer Credit is really taking a toll on the Johnson County Kansas real estate market.

I wanted to take another angle and also compare May’s (post-tax credit) market stats against a month that didn’t involve the frantic buyers trying to get under contract prior to the end of tax credit in April. So I took a look at the Johnson County Kansas market stats for May 2009 and found  781 homes went under contract. Compare this to the 438 homes that just went under contract in May 2010 and you get a huge 44% drop in contracts written. It appears, at least in the near-term, that the post-tax credit real estate market could remain a tough one for Johnson County Kansas home sellers.

Posted by Jason A. Brown