"For sale" signs are appearing and disappearing quickly from front lawns all over southwestern Pennsylvania.
That’s according to the March real estate report from West Penn Multi List Inc., which found it’s good to be a seller.
“It’s phenomenal,” said West Penn chief operating officer Barbara Kohl. “The situation right now is there just is not enough houses to sell. There are a tremendous amount of buyers out there, so what happened here locally is it went from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market very quickly.”
The 13-county region the West Penn multi-list serves showed house listings decreased 8.5 percent from March 2012 to March 2013. For West Penn, the listings include both newly constructed homes as well as houses currently owned.
In the same time span, it also shows residential homes placed under agreement increased 10.45 percent. In addition, the average sale price increased 3.4 percent from $152,467 to $157,644.
In Allegheny County, new listings decreased by 7.09 percent, with 4,322 houses on the market this year compared to 4,652 in 2012.
Kohl said Pittsburgh’s improved economy is helping.
“The job market is opening up," she said. "Corporations are looking into coming into Pittsburgh again. It’s a plus."
Kohl said this is just the beginning. The market will continue this upward slope.
“There is a lot of buyer demand out there,” she said. “So I don’t see a plateau, like if the buyer demand had dropped off, that would be telling us that we had come to a plateau, but that’s not the case. The problem is there are specific price ranges where we’re devoid of a lot of inventory, and a lot of it is that $90-150,000 range for that first time buyer jumping in, not a lot of those are available.”
