Kansas City: Existing home sales recover, new home prices up

Posted by Missouri Real Estate

June 15, 2007

The Kansas City real estate market is divided by the Kansas-Missouri state line, but it functions as a single housing market.

The market seems to be recovering from a bottom it hit in January. The Kansas City metro area, with a population of about 1.97 million, never experienced the torrid sales pace that much of the East and West Coasts did during the recent housing boom. Sales did hit a cyclical peak last June but then fell. Sales have risen for the past four months. And sales of existing homes were up 1% in April compared with April last year, though the average price fell about 1%.

For newly built homes, sales were down 18% in April compared with April 2006, but the average price rose nearly 7% to $282,990.

“We had a little optimistic building” by developers, says Diane Ruggiero, CEO of the local association of Realtors. There was a 10.4-month supply of new homes on the market in April, down from the peak of 15.9 months at the start of the year. For existing homes, there was a 6.8-month supply, up from March but down from an 8.6-month inventory in January.

“There are two differences in our market than (five years ago),” Ruggiero says. “One is bigger inventory, two is more agents. In 2001, we had 6,500 agents in this region. Now, we have a little over 10,000. There’s a huge growth in the number of people coming into the business.”

By Noelle Knox, USA TODAY

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