At first glance, the housing market seems to be singing the same refrain, not enough homes for sale leads to rising prices, fast selling homes, and frustrated home buyers. On closer inspection, however, the refrain is not exactly on repeat. Although prices continue to rise and there are fewer homes for sale, the number of new sellers continues to rise. These new sellers are a ray of hope to persistent buyers hoping to take advantage of low mortgage rate conditions to buy a home, helping to keep home sales on track. And with the public widely in agreement that now is a good time to sell, we expect more sellers ahead, likely even enough sellers to cause inventory declines to end before the end of the year.    

Weekly Housing Trends Key Findings

Key Findings:

• Median listing prices grew at 10.3 percent over last year, marking the 49th consecutive week of double-digit price growth. The pace of home price growth has been resilient in July, hanging on to a double-digit pace despite a slowing trend since peaking in April at a 17.2% year-over-year pace. Although we expect this year’s home prices to cool off in late summer heading into the fall, so far there’s not much sign of slowing. The median home listing price remains near its June record-high at $385,000.

 

• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were up 9 percent.  We’ve seen more new sellers hit the market compared to a year ago in 14 of the last 17 weeks. Because buyers are still actively pouncing on what comes to market, we haven’t seen a big shift in overall inventory trends yet, but new listings are helping propel home sales and keeping prices from climbing even higher.

 

• Total active inventory continues to shrink, but it’s only 33 percent lower than at this time last year. We continue to see even fewer homes for sale this year compared to last. Still, the gap has fallen for 15 weeks in a row now and gaining steam in the most recent 7 weeks. If the market trend continues to improve at this pace we could see total listings increase before the end of this year. 

 

• Time on market was again 21 days faster than last year. The typical active listing hit a record fast pace of 37 days in June. Homes are still selling fast, but the speed gap between 2021 and 2020 shrank somewhat and could signal an eventual seasonal cool off this year that we didn’t see last year.

Realtor.com