The Number of Homes for Sale Sets a Record : Real Estate: San Diego becomes buyer’s market, with 4,000 existing homes listed in January.

A record number of existing residential units in San Diego County were put up for sale during January, but most real estate industry observers doubt that San Diego’s long-booming residential real estate market has started to falter.

More than 4,000 new listings of existing homes were processed in January, the highest total since the San Diego Board of Realtors began keeping countywide statistics in 1983. There were about 10,000 resale units on the market Monday, according to statistics gathered by the board.

“The worm has turned, and it’s more of a buyer’s market,” Marjorie McLaughlin, president of the San Diego Board of Realtors said Monday. “The choice for home buyers at all price levels is the strongest it has been in a long time.”

Home owners also should be aware that “it’s taking longer, on average, six weeks to two months, to sell,” McLaughlin said. The board’s “unsold inventory index,” a theoretical gauge that indicates how long the existing housing inventory would take to be depleted, stood at 7.9 months in January, up from last fall, when the index hovered at about 5.6 months.

Realtors are uncertain why January generated such a dramatic increase in new listings. “We wonder if it’s a momentary blip because of interest rates and whether sellers wanted to get on the market before the rates” began to rise, McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin suggested that the wave of new listings was generated in part by news articles that graphically described the soft real estate market elsewhere in the country. People “fear Southern California is going to change next,” McLaughlin said. “But we don’t think that’s going to happen. According to the economists we’ve talked to . . . Southern California is a strong marketplace.”

Still, with the average home taking longer to sell, “for people who expect a summer transfer, now is the time to list,” McLaughlin said. “And, if you’re looking for a move up, remember that you’ll first have to sell your existing home.”

The large number of resale units on the market in January “is not a harbinger of plunging housing prices,” said Max Schetter, senior vice president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. “But I do think this is a buyer’s market.”

“There’s been a rapid run-up in prices during 1988 and 1989, and prices may have passed the liquidation level where there’s a lot of resistance,” Schetter said. “It’s to the point where the people who have money have spent it.”

Schetter believes that any slowdown will be temporary. “The economic growth that San Diego has enjoyed in past years has created a strong demand for housing,” Schetter said. “And the supply has actually lagged demand, so there’s not a big inventory of new housing out there.”

To some extent, the January surge in listings “was probably people feeling the market out, seeing what they can get for a home,” said Peter Reeb, vice president of Meyers Group, a San Diego-based firm that monitors subdivision sales. “I tell people that the market might get slow (during 1990) but that it will still be a good market.”