Hooray, finally some great numbers on Sarasota real estate!

An associate of ours has kept a speadsheet for the past few years keeping track of some critical numbers for the MLS - number of homes on the market, average number of weekly sales, etc, etc. We have fallen out of contact with this realtor and so have not had ready access to his spreadsheet -- but we reconnected today and the news is remarkable.

Anecdotally, we have noticed an uptick in activity the last few months, and so have many of our fellow realtors, title offices, mortage people, etc. It hasn't been universal, but more folks than not say they see improvement. With these new numbers, I see why.

If you take the total number of single-family homes for sale and divide by the average number of sales per week, you have, theoretically, the number of weeks it would take to sell all the existing inventory if no new homes came on the market.

We call this weeks of inventory on hand. It's a useful number because it nicely captures two big elements of the market's strength: amount of product on the market and the velocity at which it is selling.

A healthy market is generally 25-30 weeks of inventory. When our market was overheating in 2004-2005, we saw as few as 12 weeks of inventory at one point. After the bubble popped in late 2005, the weeks of inventory on hand shot up. We've watched it for the past 2 1/2 years and prayed for the day when it would trend back down!

The peak was about 140 weeks (!) early this year. But the past three months have seen a strong downward trend, to just over 80 weeks now. That's still a big number but it's the lowest we've seen in almost 2 years, and headed in the right direction.

Would it jinx the whole thing to breathe a big old sigh of relief?