Just looking at the Baltimore County, Howard County and Harford County and the big thing you notice is that the stuff selling is all under $400k. (A little more in Howard but with the highest prices in the metro area and the southern part of the county being more DC influenced this is not surprising) Above that mark is not moving. Makes sense when you look at the demographics. The speculators are gone and the ability to get a loan in which you can lie about your income is over. Now you have reality and many sellers are getting a lesson in economics.
Prices are definitely coming down as people who thought they have a $450k house end up selling for $350k after sitting on the market for 6-8 months.

The increase in price is deceiving because we have a huge drop in sales so less houses to put in the equation. All the buying is in the 200-350k range and as more houses slip down into that range they start to sell.
Basically what you spent 300k on a year or 2 ago is not comparable to what you get for your money today as your getting a much bigger and nicer home for your $'s.

That's a particular issue in Carroll County, where the pricier stuff -- $800,000-plus -- is all sitting.

With all the math wizardry realtors use, taking the houses off the market etc. , I assume the sales drop must be a lot greater.

Hmm, Ron -- I don't think taking houses off the market would artificially inflate the number of homes sold, unless I'm missing something. But that would make a difference in the total number of homes for sale. And taking houses off the market to put them back on later can affect the "days on market" number.

I believe if you pull a listing on MRIS and relist it within 6 months you do not reset the days on the market stat for the property (it does however reset the listings days on the market).

Hi, Ryan -- the way MRIS explained its (new-ish) days on market policy to me is that a home pulled off the market will show up as a new listing if it's relisted 90 days (or more) later. MRIS keeps two days-on-market stats in its system, one of which includes the grand total. But as I understand it, the one we see on the MRIS site is not the grand total.

There are many factors that affect the housing market and the new one for the second tier of suburbia is the price of gasoline.

While the suburban counties were all struggling at the high end Baltimore City's sales above one million dollars equaled the previous six months and you see the impact on the average price. These sales were worth more than $8.7M and if you take them out of the equation, the average sale price of the other 502 properties was $190,815, a 1.2% drop from May 2007. May 2007 had only one sale above $1M but May's million dollar sales are part of the market and the point is that individual buyers and sellers need to make decisions based on their particular set of circumstances. We seem to lose sight of the fact the housing also provides shelter.

30% of sales in the metro area were on the market for 30 days or less and 46% sold in 60 or fewer days. Only about 18% of the contracts in the metro area are contingent, which points out that the majority of the activity is in the first time buyer market and many of them are buying non-owner occupied properties. Remember a couple of years ago when more than half of the Baltimore City transactions were to non-owner occupants.

Addressing another point, houses coming off the market, 30% of the harbor side neighborhood transactions are rentals and many of these properties are listed for rent and for sale. When they rent, the for sale listing is withdrawn. I don't know what the percentage is throughout the City or metro area but in Federal Hill, Fells Point and Canton it is significant enough to skew the numbers when compared to historical data.

Great stats, Ross -- thank you for sharing them!