Real Estate New Listings Prices Holding Strong into the Holidays

It’s Monday December 21, 2020 and this is your weekly look at the latest Altos Research data that came in over the weekend for the entire US real estate market. Each week, Altos tracks every home for sale in the entire US. Pricing, changes in pricing, supply and demand and we make these analytics available to our customers so that you can see the trends in the US housing market far before it becomes available through the traditional data channels.

Here’s our national single family inventory chart with just a handful more days until the end of the year. The market is obviously always slow this time of year with only 450,000 homes on the market right now. We’ll get fresh inventory starting mid-January and the trough will be somewhere around 400,000 before the total number of homes for sale starts climbing in February for the first and second quarter. We are not expecting any significant inventory climb in 2021, but by August or so we should have more homes available than this year. In our January webinar, we’ll be able to spend some time on that housing inventory forecast for 2021. Stay tuned for that.

The low inventory crisis is acute this year due to the pandemic, but also chronic, due to a decade of low interest rates. Here’s 5 years of weekly new listing volume. I like this chart because we can see how right now is in a normal range for this time of year. The thick lines here show late December for five years. You can also see that we usually have a 100,000 new listings week at the peak of the year, usually late second quarter. This year that never happened. We had 46,000 new listings in the last week, expect that to plummet this week and next to the lowest levels of the year and then start our January climb. We do our monthly webinars early in the month, so our January webinar will be just as we’re seeing those new 2021 trends. Should be fun to see what the data already tells us.

And of course that leaves us with this week’s price check. The median price of a single family home this week in the US is $340,000, which ticked down from last week. Lots of seasonality in the price numbers for the next few weeks, but we’re looking to round out 2020 with a 10% price gain over 2019.

The New Listings pricing has held up unseasonably strong, at $299,000 this week, down just a hair from last week. That’ll drop the next few weeks too, but it’s already a bullish leading indicator for home prices in the spring of 2021.

That’s all for this week. Happy solstice. I hope your holidays are joyful. Looking forward to much more in 2021. Realtors - don’t forget to download the eBook from Altos Research to develop your expertise with the market data for your clients and prospects. 2021 is going to demand it from you so that’s why we put that book together. Link in the description below. More soon.

#realestatemarket #realestateinvesting #buyingrealestate