Is the housing market seeing sellers come back in?
The most recent housing market report from Altos Research was just released, and the data indicates that we’re seeing a return of sellers to the housing market.
There are currently 556,000 single-family homes available on the U.S. housing market. That’s up 2% week-over-week, and up 32% year-over-year. We’re also close to breaking last year’s highest level, and the calendar hasn’t flipped to May yet.
Last week added 72,000 new listings to the market. The last time we saw a jump that big in a single week was in July 2022. Last week also saw about 21,000 homes go immediately into contract. So, the jump in inventory should be monitored, but we’re still seeing a healthy level of homes going into contract right away. This indicates that there are enough buyers to keep home prices at or near their current levels in the short term.
The housing market currently has about 398,000 homes in contract. That’s 6% more than last year, but still about 50,000 units lower than we saw at the same time in 2022.
When it comes to home prices, the national median price of homes in contract was $398,097 last week. That’s up 4.7% year-over-year, but down slightly week-over-week. There was a slight increase in the percentage of homes that saw price cuts week-over-week. In the current market 32.5% of homes saw a recent price reduction. That’s about 0.5% week-over-week but shows about 2%-3% increase on year-over-year chart. This could indicate the start of a cool off in home prices, but we’ll need more data to confirm if this is a trend or not.
Where did mortgage rates start the week?
The national average for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage rate ticked slightly lower on Monday, closing down 0.02% to 7.43%*.
Market watchers are waiting for Wednesday’s announcement from the Federal Reserve. We did get guidance on borrowing estimates from the U.S. Treasury department for the 2nd quarter on Monday, and that did spur a bit of action in the bond market. However, Wednesday’s announcement and Friday’s unemployment data are expected to provide a bit more direction.
What does a record-breaking bidding war look like?
Every homeowner would love to have a bidding war occur over their property, but one home in New Jersey recently set a record.
A property in Maplewood, NJ was listed on the market on March 6th, and went through the normal process of showings and an open house. The home was listed for $739k, but ended up selling for more than $1.1 million by the time the dust settled.
The property broke a state record for a home sold above asking price, just clearing the 55% benchmark set in 2023.
80 people toured the home. It received 18 offers, and was under contract nine days after listing.
* National average rates accurate as of 4/29/24 from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are not advertised rates from Guaranteed Rate.
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