As you can see, inventoty levels seem to have capped, which could be a good sign.  We won’t know for sure until we see a definite trend over a period of time.  It is encouraging to see inventory levels stop.  We predicted this would happen about now and start a slow decline.  This remains to be seen.  We do know that locally pending sales picked up a bit, and median home prices have been up 4 out of the last 5 months.  I think the next two months may give us a clearer sense of direction moving forward, so stay tuned.  We can all watch together.

The Ellis Team at RE/MAX Realty Group in Fort Myers Florida long ago developed a system that accurately gauges market activity relative to Supply levels, and we deemd this index the Current Market Index.  We developed this index because it helps tell the story of where we are today, not just where we’ve been with closed sales reports.  The higher the CMI Index, the more supply we have relative to demand.

Since January 2007 we also changed the MLS reporting system, as the MLS of Greater Fort Myers and the Beach became part of a larger system called MLS Alliance.  Local Boards no longer data share with each other, but rather this new entity.  We’ve tried to align the fields up accuratley to reflect the same data, even though each Board reports slightly differently.  We have no less than 6 Boards that post Lee County properties into this database, so it is broad based and very useful.