Maryland's housing market spiraled further downward this past summer, registering the fourth-biggest drop among all the states as home sales fell nearly 30 percent from a year earlier.
Despite the tumbling sales, the median sale price of existing homes in the Baltimore area managed to rise 1.7 percent in the July-September quarter compared with the same period last year, according to a National Association of Realtors report released yesterday. But Maryland's home-sales dive of 28.6 percent was more than double the 13.7 percent drop for the nation.
Indications are that the market isn't getting better. Home sales in Baltimore and the five surrounding counties plunged 31.74 percent in October from a year earlier, the most in the eight years that Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. has tracked sales through the multiple listing service.
"At one point, homes were selling very fast, and now the inventory is catching up and overtaking the demand," said Daraius Irani, director of the applied economics group at RESI, Towson University's research and consulting arm. "It's somewhat of a concern that it's fallen."
Only three states -- Nevada, Florida and Arizona -- had greater slumps in home sales than Maryland. That only two states, North Dakota and Vermont, posted increases emphasizes the severity of the housing market slowdown, industry experts said.
The sales picture in Maryland deteriorated over the course of the year, the NAR data show. In the second quarter, the year-over-year decline was 21.1 percent, the fifth-worst in the nation. In the first quarter, the decline was 10 percent. Still, during the third quarter, all the state's metro areas surveyed, except Hagerstown/Martinsburg, W.Va., reported an increase in the median sale price of existing single-family homes. The median is the midpoint, with half of the homes selling for more and half for less.
At 70th, the Baltimore region ranked near the middle of the 150 metropolitan areas surveyed nationwide, 93 of which demonstrated price increases, according to the NAR report. Hagerstown, where prices dropped by 8 percent, was one of 54 metro areas to experience declines. The biggest price drop -- 12.4 percent -- came in Palm Bay/Melbourne, Fla.
The median price in the Washington, D.C., metro area, including Northern Virginia, rose 1.3 percent, the NAR reported.
