While some local Realtors remain optimistic about what the new year has in store, many are having to work with a limited number of homes coming on the market.

Valisa Schmidley, with Keller Williams in Roseville, said that the decreased inventory has caused more competition among buyers.

“What I am seeing is a lot of buyers somewhat frustrated,” Schmidley said. “They cannot find what they are looking for on the market in Granite Bay.”

Schmidley said currently, there is a lot of pent up buyer interest in the market and buyers have been “sitting on the sidelines” waiting for what they perceived as the bottom.

“Now the perception is we have seen the bottom,” Schmidley said. “And we may be beginning to stabilize in many price ranges across the board.”

The number of single family homes for sale in Roseville dropped 44 percent from October 2010 to December 2011, according to statistics provided by Mark and Shelley Koumelis of Keller Williams Realty in Roseville.

“I would say that inventory is a little thinner than we would like,” Mark Koumelis said. “It depends on what you are looking for and in what price range.”

The amount of homes sold during that same period, however, rose 14 percent, giving some local Realtors and buyers a perception that the market may be turning around, despite the decrease in inventory.

“My perception is that it is improving,” Koumelis said. “I think that sales are going to be a little better this year. As far as home values go, I don’t think they are going to change, if at all.”

Leslie Kelly recently purchased a home in Granite Bay and said she feels it was the right time to buy, given that interest rates are at historic lows combined with a deflated housing market.

She said that she and her husband were interested in the local market five or six years ago but could not have afforded to buy in Granite Bay at that time.

“We lived in the area for about 15 years,” Kelly said. “To come back and have the prices be deflated here, to us it looked like a good deal.”

Kelly, who had been living in Los Angeles for three years before relocating to Granite Bay, said she doesn’t think housing prices will drop much more, if at all, and that a buyer right now has to think about the long term.

“You have to know that you are going to hold onto it for a little bit, because I’m not sure if we’ve hit the bottom,” Kelly said.

Koumelis said that as a Realtor, he typically hears at this time of year that banks are going to release a “flood of foreclosures” onto the market, but so far that hasn’t happened.

That being said, Koumelis says there are still plenty of homes on the market, many of which are “distressed” sales — meaning short sales or foreclosures.

According to Koumelis, in December, 47 percent of the home listings in east Roseville were distressed, 40 percent in west Roseville and 58 percent of the homes for sale in central Roseville were distressed.

Schmidley said that she feels very optimistic about the coming year, and that there is a high level of activity on the real estate market right now.

“There has been so much doom and gloom and so much negative ink over the last few years,” she said. “I think that you miss the other side of that, and that is that it is a tremendous opportunity for buyers to buy.”

Toby Lewis can be reached at tobyl@goldcountrymedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TobyLewis_RsvPT.