I frequently discuss supply and demand in my blog posts and now that 2009 is closed out I thought it might be useful to report the full year sales for Montgomery County Maryland.  In 2009 there were a total of 10,362 homes sold in all of Montgomery County.  I'm not going to list the breakdowns by area but suffice it to say the the concentrations are pretty typical - Gaithersburg, N. Potomac, Germantown, Silver Spring, Bethesda and Rockville were all well represented.  As in past slow downs, the further out you go from these core populations centers as people are priced out of close in neighborhoods, the fewer sales you will find.

To put this into perspective, in all of Montgomery County at the peak of the boom (full year 2004) 17,758 homes were sold.  From there it was all down hill with 2008 looking like the bottom (hopeful) of the trough with 8,521 sales.

For right now things are looking a bit better although there is still substantially more available inventory in the county than during the boom years that ended in 2005 that will have to be worked off before things feel more stable.  Inventory in the 2,000 range will be a good thing!  Right now we're still around 3,500 available homes.

Keep an eye on the inventory and you'll know when things are looking up!