Average price followed suit from August, increasing month-over-month yet again, for the second month in a row. Why is this important? Well, it could be the start of something called a “trend.” With prices declining for five straight months, perhaps two months of price increases signals that the market has hit bottom. We saw an average home price of $1,086,762 in September, good for a 0.7% improvement over the $1,079,500 recorded in August. Two months ago in this space, I wrote: “…but it almost feels like we’re going to see the first year-over-year decline in average home price since the pandemic, and that could come in August,” Well, I was off by one month, because on a year-over-year basis, we saw a 4.3% decline from the $1,135,027 average home price in September of 2021. This is the first month of 2022 that’s seen a year-over-year decline.
Sales actually declined from August to September, which isn’t exactly uncommon, having happened eight times in the past twenty years, but nobody was expecting it to happen this fall. We saw 5,038 sales in September, down 10.5% from the 5,627 sales figure in August. But the media is already running with the year-over-year data, which shows a drop from 9,010 sales in September of 2021 to 5,038 this past month, resulting in a headline-worthy 44.1% drop. As I noted in Wednesday’s blog post, sales are down because inventory is down, and of the inventory that we do have, there are far too many re-listings. In this space last month, I said, “I expect we’ll see a decline of “only” 20% in September, maybe less. There were 9,046 sales in September of 2021, so we’d need to see 7,237 sales for that to happen. Do we really expect to see less than that?” Wow, did that ever age poorly!
New listings were up on a month-over-month basis, from 10,537 in August to 11,237 in September, or 6.6%. But despite that increase, it’s worth noting that the 11,237 new listings are the second-lowest of any month of September since 2002. The relative data may show an uptick in inventory, but on an absolute basis, you can’t deny the second-fewest listings in any month of September is noteworthy and explains why this September is slow. Year-over-year, new listings are down from 13,494, or 16.7%. But with sales down by a much larger percentage, active listings are going to spike.
Active listings remained somewhat flat, increasing a mere 1.7% from 13,305 in August to 13,534 in the month of September. Year-over-year is where we see that spike: from 9,187 in September of 2021 to 13,534 this past month, which represents a 47.3% increase. For what it’s worth, that figure was 62.3% in August, which means that despite the decline in sales, the inventory is being absorbed a little faster.
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