Average price increased substantially for the second month in a row, this time moving from $1,153,269 in April to $1,196,101, a 3.7% increase. That’s on the heels of a 4.0% increase from March to April. All told, the average home price has increased by 15.2% from January through May. Year-over-year, the average home price is still down by 1.2%, with that $1,196,101 price last month trailing the $1,212,806 mark recorded in May of 2022. Considering that the year-over-year gap was 17.9% in February, it’s impressive that the 2023 market has almost caught up. I said in this space last month, “…the year-over-year delta is shrinking and I believe we’ll pull even by summer, and surpass 2022’s figures by fall.” It looks like we’re on pace, and then some.
Sales rose for the fourth month in a row as 9,012 transactions were posted in May. That’s a 19.7% increase over the 7,531 sales recorded in April and outpaces the 9.2% increase we saw from March to April. Year-over-year, sales in May were actually 24.7% higher than the 7,226 recorded in May of 2022. It’s important to remember that in 2022, we peaked in February/March, and the interest rate hikes and media sensationalism had taken over by May. So while we’re peaking here in May of 2023, we had already been declining for two months by this time in 2022.
New listings were up substantially last month, which would probably explain the increase in sales. We saw 11,364 new listings in April and 15,194 in May; that’s a whopping 33.7% increase, month-over-month. Historically-speaking, that’s still not a lot. Those 15,194 new listings rank 17th in the last 22 months of May, although coincidentally, May sales were also in 17th place in the past twenty-two years as well. Year-over-year, new listings are down by 18.7% from the 18,687 posted in May of 2022. Interesting, considering how “slow” the market was in May of 2022 and yet we still trail the number of new listings by one-fifth.
Active listings increased by a modest 2.5% on a month-over-month basis, from 10,120 in March to 10,373 in April, which is basically a rounding error. But as noted in the previous section, if listing activity is down almost 40% and sales are only down by 5%, then absorption is increasing. That’s why it’s no surprise to see a 20.8% decline in active listings, year-over-year, from the 13,092 recorded at the end of April, 2022, to the 10,373 recorded last month. This is on the heels of a 0.4% decline, year-over-year, in March, so when we look back at this market by year’s end, we’ll have seen April as the true tipping point.
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