Market watcher Steve Thomas at  Re/Max Real Estate Services in Aliso Viejo reports that shoppers’ demand for O.C. housing (as measured by homes placed into pending escrows in local brokers’ listing service within the past month) hit 3,060 last Thursday — highest since September 2005. Meanwhile, the active inventory of O.C. homes listed for sale dropped below 15,000 for the first time since the beginning of January.

Says Thomas: “Many homeowners do not want to compete with the volume of short sales, sellers who owe more than their homes are worth, and foreclosures. The general public is acutely aware that it is a buyer’s market and that it takes a lot of time and patience to sell. I was expecting the inventory to grow to 20,000 homes, but I simply did not factor that the public would perceptively refrain from marketing their homes without proper motivation.”

Thomas also calculates “market time,” a benchmark of how many months it theoretically takes to sell all the inventory in the local MLS for-sale listings at the current pace of pending deals being made. By this Thomas logic, it would take 4.86 months for O.C. buyers to gobble up all homes listed for sale at the current pace of deals vs. 5.61 months two weeks earlier and vs. 8.50 months a year ago.
Here’s data by the price slice as of last Thursday for O.C. homes listed on market; pending deals, Thomas’ market time, in months; and market time two weeks ago and a year ago (Note: k=thousand; m=million) …