The State of the Market

For the past three years, the real estate market has been all over the place. The pendulum has swung wildly from ultra low interest rates causing massive bidding wars to low inventory and generation high rates. Basically, it’s gone from underwhelming to overwhelming. As the corners of the internet lament, can’t we just be whelmed for once? Experts are hinting that maybe the real estate market for the week ending January 20th might be returning to a sense of just regular, boring normality. Here’s a look at the current state of the US housing market!

Economic data manager for Realtor.com, Sabrina Speianu, analyzed the market and says, “This past week, the housing market showed the early signs of a return to normal, with slowing median listing price growth, a growing inventory of homes for sale, and mortgage rates which have fallen more than a percentage point from their recent peak.” 

And they have. Even though rates ticked up ever so slightly last week to 6.69% (up from 6.60 the week before), this rate fluctuation is well within normal variation for rates from week to week. It’s actually not incredibly common for rates to simply shoot up two whole percentage points- or fall two whole percentage points, for that matter- so there’s actually a calm comfort in the fact that rates are behaving normally this week. 

Furthermore, home prices are also cooling a bit. Granted, median list prices are still rising but not at the double-digit increases we experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems counterintuitive but even though prices are ever so slightly still growing, the actual median listing price has still decreased from it’s all-time high last summer. (We’re currently sitting at a national median listing price of $410,000. It had previously been as high as $429,000)

What seems to be stressed by experts is that the state of the current market is… normal. It’s not overwhelming. It’s not underwhelming. It’s just behaving in the ways in which it normally does during the winter months. That bodes well for the typical Spring and Summer uptick. After years of ping-pong, there’s something nice about things going as planned. 

Tell us in the comments: would you prefer to buy a home now during the slow winter months with lighter inventory, or during the Spring or Summer where there tends to be more inventory but also more buyers?