Housing Supply Rises
As Sellers Wait

The supply of homes available for sale in most major metropolitan areas rose only slightly in January, a month when for-sale signs usually sprout in greater numbers after the holiday lull.

Total listings of homes in 29 metro areas at the end of last month were up 1.1% from a month earlier, according to figures compiled by ZipRealty Inc., a real-estate-brokerage firm based in Emeryville, Calif. The data cover all listings of single-family homes, condos and town houses on local multiple-listing services in those areas, where Zip operates.

Listings normally rise about 5% in January from December, said Thomas Lawler, a housing economist in Leesburg, Va. The lack of a big January rise this year suggests that people who don't need to sell their homes are taking them off the market because "conditions are so lousy," Mr. Lawler said.

Homeowners are competing with aggressively priced properties from builders and lenders that have acquired homes through foreclosure. Mr. Lawler said about 40% of home sales in California in last year's fourth quarter involved foreclosed properties.

Despite the small January increase, there are still plenty of homes available, and sales remain sluggish. Inventory was up 20% from January 2007 in 18 metro areas for which Zip has comparable year-earlier data.

The National Association of Realtors said yesterday that its pending-home-sales index in December declined 1.5% from a month earlier to 85.9. A sale is considered pending when a contract has been signed but the transaction hasn't been completed. The index equates the 2001 level of activity to 100.

Many housing economists expect home prices to continue falling in much of the country at least through the end of this year.

Metro areas with the largest January increases in listings included Tucson, Ariz. (up 5.2%); Phoenix (3.4%); and Seattle (3.2%), ZipRealty found.

ZipRealty doesn't provide data on the New York borough of Manhattan. But Jonathan Miller, director of research at Radar Logic Inc., a real-estate-information provider, says the number of homes listed for sale in Manhattan at the end of January was 5,926, up 9.4% from a month earlier.

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