Condo listings are going up or down, depending on which side of the state line you’re on.

In Massachusetts, the number of condos on the market last month declined 28 percent, according to data released yesterday by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. It marked the first April decline in condo listings in five years.

At the current pace of sales, it would take about 9½ months to sell all the condos currently on the market in Massachusetts.

In Rhode Island, condo listings rose 21 percent from a year earlier — and they are up more than 140 percent since 2005, according to data from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors. To sell off all the condos on the market in Rhode Island would take about 11 months — or 1½ months longer than in Massachusetts.

People in the real-estate industry generally say a “balanced market” is when there is a 7½ to 8½ months of supply, said Eric Berman, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Higher inventory levels generally tend to put what economists call “downward pressure” on prices. And that could partly explain why condo prices in Rhode Island during the first quarter fell nearly 10 percent.

In Massachusetts, condo sales last month declined, according to two separate real-estate reports. The Massachusetts Association of Realtors reported that condo sales fell 0.7 percent, while The Warren Group, a Boston-based research firm that also tracks sales by owners, reported condo sales declined 4.9 percent from April of last year.

The groups presented different data on prices. The association reported the median price of a condo in Massachusetts ticked up 0.3 percent, to $345,000, while The Warren Group reported the median price fell 2.5 percent, to $265,475.

In Massachusetts, the overall inventory of single-family houses and condos has declined now for the fourth consecutive month — a sign that the market is headed “in a positive direction,” said Doug Azarian, a real-estate broker and president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Major developers continue to push forward with construction of luxury condo high-rises in downtown Boston, but the “local general contractor who was buying up apartments and flipping it to condos has slowed down a bit,” said Suzanne E. Mulvee, senior real-estate economist for Property & Portfolio Research, in Boston.

Source: Mass., R.I. Associations of Realtors

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Condo, Real Estate. Tags: Boston Condo Inventory Massachusetts Massachusetts Association of Realtors Property Realtor Realtors Rhode Island Rhode Island Association of Realtors The Warren Group Warren Group . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.