Houses for sale: A record local inventory

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By MATT OLBERDING / Lincoln Journal Star

Drive around the city of Lincoln and you’re likely to see a lot of “for sale” signs in yards.

According to the most recent figures available, there are 2,128 homes for sale in the local market, an all-time high and 450 more than at the same time last year.

And that’s only homes advertised in the local Multiple Listing System that real estate agents use. It doesn’t even count “for sale by owner” homes or new construction that’s being sold directly through the builder.

All that inventory has some local Realtors worried.

Barney Helton, who’s been a Realtor for several years and has spent most of his career either building or selling houses, said the market has really slowed down and many homes are taking a long time to sell or aren’t selling at all.

“To me, it’s starting to get kind of ugly now,” said Helton, who’s an agent with Woods Bros.

After starting the year strong, local home sales have dropped off significantly, according to data from the Lincoln Association of Realtors.

Through March, sales for the year were actually ahead of the record pace of 2004. But things cooled in April and May, and now the pace of home sales is off more than 7 percent compared with last year.

Much of that decrease is due to slower sales of new homes, which are down more than 30 percent from last year.

Allen Barber, owner of Barber Homes and president of the Home Builders Asociation of Lincoln, said new construction is “very spotty” right now.

Overall, the market’s not very good, he said, but some individual builders are doing well.

Sluggish sales combined with the record high inventory is likely contributing to the increase in the time it’s taking to sell homes.

According to the Realtors’ figures, homes are spending an average of 67 days on the market before selling. That may not sound like a lot, but as recently as last September, homes were taking only 46 days, on average,  to sell.

Helton said in his experience lately the average time for homes to sell has been more like six months.

He blames much of the bloated inventory on the for sale by owner market and on new homes that haven’t sold.

It’s difficult to assess how many people are selling their homes without a Realtor.

A Web site called www.fsbolincoln.com lists about 55 active properties for sale in Lincoln and the surrounding area, but more than half of those are lots.

Assessing the number of new homes for sale is a little bit easier, but it’s still not an exact science.

A recent search of the Woods Bros. Web site, which also lists homes for sale through Home Real Estate, produced 432 listings classified as new construction.

Another real estate company, BancWise Real Estate Solutions, listed 64 new homes for sale on its Web site. 

Helton said he thinks a lot of home builders built what are called “speculative” homes — homes  that aren’t sold before they’re built, and that that has inflated the number of homes for sale in the local market.

Barber disagreed, saying he hasn’t seen an “overabundance” of that.

He also said he really couldn’t quantify how many new homes are for sale and what the affect on the local market is.

“Inventory is a problem,” Barber said. “How much of that is new construction? I can’t give you an honest answer.”

The large number of homes on the market is not a problem unique to Lincoln.

The number of homes for sale in the Omaha area is  34 percent higher than at the same time last year, according to real estate market research company Trendgraphix.

And the National Association of Realtors reported a 5.5 percent increase in the number of homes for sale at the end of May, raising the total number of homes for sale nationwide to 3.6 million.

That’s small consolation to Helton, who said he thinks the Lincoln market is nearing a tipping point that could have a big negative impact.  

“At some point pretty quick the market’s going to take a dive,” he said.  

Reach Matt Olberding at 473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com.