Tight inventory is helping to force Orange County home shoppers to pay more, two reports show.

The latest Orange County home inventory report from Steve Thomas and ReportsOnHousing.com — data as of Dec. 20 — shows just 3,254 homes listed for sale — down 61 percent from a year ago and the lowest number in records dating back to June 2004.

Meanwhile, the latest Orange County homebuying report — for the 22 business days ending December 7– shows a median selling price for all residences of $464,000 — that is up 16 percent vs. a year ago.

Thomas writes:

“Since it is the holidays, fewer homes are coming on the market and those are instantly snapped up. The anemic (inventory) levels are here to stay until the end of the “Holiday Market,” the third week in January. That is when homeowners have had enough time to shake off the holiday stupor and forget about their New Year¹s resolutions. It will be time to focus on real estate once again.”

Higher prices and tight inventory have yet to slow closings.

DataQuick found Orange County sales of 3,265 residences closed in the latest period — up 27.4 percent vs. a year ago. Resales of single-family homes were up 27.3 percent vs. last year; condo sales rose 19.9 percent vs. year ago. Builders’ new homes sales were 61.4 percent higher in the same period.

Thomas, however, did show that pending sales – the total of new deals put into the escrow process — was off 2 percent from a year ago. That’s a hint that the big year-over-year growth in closings witnessed in recent months could cool shortly.

Thomas’ signature housing measurement is his “market time” benchmark. It tracks how many months it theoretically takes to sell the entire inventory in the local MLS for-sale listings at the current pace of pending deals being made. By this Thomas logic, as of Dec. 20 — we see:

• Market time of 1.35 months (41 days) for Orange County buyers to gobble up all homes for sale at the current pace vs. 1.37 months two weeks ago vs. 3.41 months a year ago vs. 4.64 months two years ago.
• Orange County homes listed for under a million bucks have a market time of one months vs. 5.39 months for homes listed for more than $1 million. So, basically, it is 5.4 times harder to sell a million-dollar-plus residence!
• And just so you know, the million-dollar market represents 32 percent of all homes listed and 8 percent of all homes that entered into escrow in the past 30 days.
• DataQuick’s analysis of recent closed sales shows that the $464,000 median selling price is still 28 percent below June 2007′s peak of $645,000. Yet it is 25 percent above the cyclical low hit in January 2009 at $370,000. So the median has recouped 34 percent of the $275,000 price drop from the peak.
• DataQuick found a broad homebuying recovery: 52 of 83 Orange County ZIP codes had both rising sales and prices in the period.