A quick look at Savannah area home prices

My City Talk column today is about the slight year-over-year increase in Savannah metro area home prices and the likelihood that we could see prices change relatively little for an extended period of time.

I cite Zillow’s latest estimates for the Savannah metro area in that column.

I’ll embed that data here:

US Zillow Home Value Index

As you can see, the local estimates are pretty noisy, with some improbably large changes over short periods of time. That’s probably related to the relatively small amount of data compared to larger areas (for a long time, Zillow did not even give estimates like this for Savannah, and Case-Shiller will likely never give detailed estimates for a metro of our size).

I think the main issue going forward for prices is inventory. In July, the Savannah metro area had over 7 months of inventory; historically, a normal level of inventory is 5 months or so.