This week, average list prices dropped a bit and inventories — the number of homes for sale — went up slightly in the four areas surveyed as part of the Arkansas Realtors® Association average/median list prices and inventories report.

There were no real surprises in this week’s report, but it is very clear that the homes moving fastest these days are priced at around $150,000 or less. That, of course, has a lot to do with the first-time home buyer tax credit that is motivating people to purchase homes.

To get a copy of the current Arkansas average/median list prices and inventories report in PDF format, click here.

To get an idea of how critical those first-time buyers are to the current market, let’s look at some sales from Benton and Washington counties. Since June 1, there have been 1,786 sales in those counties — 1,030 of the homes sold cost $150,000 or less while 756 cost more than that. The median number of days on market for homes costing $150,000 or less was 102, while homes that cost more than that spent 122 days on the market.

It’s worth mentioning that the first-time home buyer tax credit expires after Nov. 30, so buyers wanting to take advantage of it are advised to start shopping this month. If it takes 30 days to find a home and 30 days to close on it, then that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for shoppers who start looking for homes after the first of October.

It’s worth mentioning that the National Association of Realtors® is lobbying hard to extend the current tax credit. Stay tuned for more details — Realtors® in Arkansas are generally in favor of such an extension (or an expansion) so we’ll release more details as we get them.

Every week the Arkansas Realtors Association collects and distributes the average and median list prices and the number of homes in inventory (homes for sale) for single family, new and existing houses in four markets. Those markets are Benton and Washington counties in Northwest Arkansas, the Fort Smith/Van Buren areas (Crawford and Sebastian counties) in west Arkansas, the Jonesboro area (Craighead County) in northeast Arkansas and the Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway Metropolitan Statistical Area (Faulkner, Grant, Lonoke, Perry, Pulaski and Saline counties) in central Arkansas. While those four markets don’t tell the whole story, looking at them together gives us a pretty good idea about developing trends in markets throughout the state.

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