Months of Inventory - Santa Barbara Homes

Here are the current months of inventory for the Santa Barbara South Coast, (Carpinteria to Goleta), homes only, (not condos).

Months of Inventory, or Market Velocity, is the number of months it would take to sell all the current active listings, at the current pace of sales, assuming no new listings are added.  To calculate this, we use the number of properties that entered escrow in the immediate past 30 days.  This is a much better indication of buyer confidence today vs. closed sales that reflect buyer activity 2-4 months ago.

As a rule of thumb, 0-3 months of inventory indicate a sellers' market; 3-6 months indicates a "balanced market"; 6-9 months is a buyers' market and 9+ months is indicative of a weak market.

As of a few days ago, there were 479 homes for sale on the South Coast; 84 homes went pending in the immediate past 30 days, giving a market-wide rate of 5.7 months of inventory.

Breakdown by neighborhoods is as follows:

Carpinteria & Summerland:  7 mos of inv.

Montecito:  9.8 mos. of inv.

Santa Barbara:  4 mos. of inv.

Hope Ranch:  11 mos. of inv.

Goleta:  4.3 mos. of inv.

By price range:

$0-1 million:  3.1 mos. of inv.

$1-2 million:  6.8 mos. of inv.

$2-3 million:  8.1 mos. of inv.

$3-4 million:  16 mos. of inv.

$4-8 million:  7.7 mos. of inv.

$8+ million:  20+ mos. of inv.

One can see that the "hottest" segments of the market are the Santa Barbara & Goleta homes under $1 million; and the softest part of our local market is Montecito $8+ million.