The first quarter of 2023 is in the books and activity is following the more typical seasonal trend and things are starting to pick up, though still lagging prior years in some metrics.
New Listings:
As I mentioned in last month’s update, March is usually when we start to see the number of new listings coming to market spike as the spring buying season ramps up. That is, in fact, what happened in March, which actually exceeded the number of new listings in March 2022 by nearly 6%. Lower price points drove that, with homes priced below 750K up nearly 8% over last year, and homes over 750K up about 3.7%.
Months of Inventory:
Despite the fact that we have more new listings coming to the market than we did last March, the months of inventory did decline in March.
And same as last month, the picture is not the same across all price points, which you can see here:
Pending Transactions:
As I have mentioned before, the most real-time view I can provide of market activity is really the new pending transactions. I look at these both weekly and monthly.
On a monthly basis, the year started off slower than past Januarys, and February was slightly slower than January. March picked up, following the same uptick as 2022, but at a lower volume.
Interest rates have been on a downward trend for the last few weeks. The low point this year was the week of 1/29-2/4 at 6.09%. They then peaked at 6.73% the week of 3/5-3/11, and now have come back down to 6.28% this week.
About The Author
