Average price declined for the third straight month, this time moving only 1.2%, from $1,051,216 in December to $1,038,668 in January, which is less than half of the 2.6% decline from November to December. It is somewhat rare, however, to see the average home price drop from December to January, as it’s only happened 6 times in the last 20 years. Year-over-year, the decline looks quite dire, as the $1,038,668 home price in January represents a 16.4% drop in average home price from the $1,242,407 recorded in January of last year. This is going to look even worse in February, based on the “peak” of the 2022 market, but it will subside thereafter.
Sales were not expected to be significant, at least not by me! I predicted 3,000 sales on my blog last month, so I wasn’t surprised to see an even 3,100 recorded in January, which represents a 0.5% decline from the 3,117 sales in December. Those 3,100 sales are the second-lowest in any month of January, topped only by the figure recorded in 2009. Year-over-year, we saw a 44.6% decline from the 5,594 sales in January of 2023.
New listings skyrocketed last month, moving from the mere 4,074 we noted in December to 7,688 in January, an increase of 88.7%. Of course, we would expect January inventory to be higher than December, which explains why, despite this huge month-over-month surge, we saw a decline on the year-over-year side, as new listings of 7,983 in January of 2022 declined to 7,688 last month. This represents a 3.7% drop. It’s also worth noting that the 7,688 new listings in January were the second-lowest in any January, which we just read in the section above with respect to sales.
Active listings increased modestly from December to January, moving from 8,692 to 9,299, which is a 7.0% increase, coming on the heels of a 27.0% decrease from November to December. Year-over-year, those 9,299 new listings represent a 124.6% increase over the 4,140 recorded at the end of January, 2022. Of course, as large as this 124.6% figure looks, it’s actually down from last month when the December-over-December figure showed a 169.0% increase!
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