Attached are the recently updated real estate charts. The monthly charts are updated through the end of December 2022. The rest are date stamped with the day they were updated. The charts are selected from a larger list of charts that I keep which is why some numbers are skipped. Feel free to share these with your clients and on social media.
1a.– Active residences (current inventory) – Inventory has declined out of the range it was in since July. This is normal for the end of the year and in a normal annual cycle, the first week of January is usually a low in inventory and it starts to rise from there. If we are back to normal, we can expect more homes on the market in the coming months. I’ve included the number of homes on the market at various times on the chart to give perspective.
2a. – Median prices. The correction in prices continues. The three month median moving average (red dotted line) reveals the leading edge of market prices. The three month median price dropped in price in again in December. From the high of $469,000 in September, prices have declined to $435,000 at the end of December. That is a 7.25% decline from the high (on the three-month median average). The twelve-month median average is a slower moving average and crested at $450,000 in October and November and turned down in December to $449,000.
4. – Median DOM (days on market) for homes that sold over the past 30 days. The median number of days on market continued to decline for the month of December.
My simple interpretation of this is that there are buyers waiting in the wings and when the house that meets their qualifications comes on the market, they quickly make the offer to purchase and get it into escrow. It appears, though, that the bulk of these waiting buyers are looking for lower prices.
7 . – Current total number of pendings. In previous emails, I have been showing the pending numbers for the past 30 days. I have switched to a different chart this time to give a broader perspective of what is going on in the market. It is all the pendings in the market and not just those of the past 30 days. I have been recording data for this chart since September of 2006. You can see that the current number of pendings is the lowest it has been in those 16 plus years. Even though there are buyers waiting in the wings, it is very obvious that there are substantially fewer buyers than there were one and two years ago. Higher interest rates is one reason, it may also be that fewer people are relocating here to work from home. I’d be interested in your thoughts about these much lower numbers.
9a. – Annual sales 1989 on. I switched to different chart here also, to show a comparison of the number of homes sold on an annual basis. As you can see, sales numbers are down substantially this past year compared to the previous few years. There were 250 fewer homes sold in 2022 compared to 2021. That is approximately 21 fewer homes each month on average. This is a dramatic change but I anticipate sales number to begin to climb as we approach Spring.
11. – List price compared to sold price. This chart shows data to the end of December 2022. Median listing prices are decreasing as well as median sales prices. This is expected when interest rates have risen as much as they have in the past year. Buyers are unable to afford at 6.5% as much as they could at 3%. If interest rates stay at the level they are or rise further, sellers will have to accommodate buyers with lower prices if they want to sell. Wage appreciation has not covered the increase in a house payment caused by higher interest rates.
13. – Percentage of cash sales in Single Family homes. More than a quarter of all single family homes are sold with cash purchases. We ended the year at 27.77%
