I’ve got some good news and bad news, but mostly good news.
Bad news: no pretty graphs this week and some quotes, so more reading for you. Good news: some cool things are happening in the housing market recovery.
Mike Simonsen via Housing Wire published something super important this month that I want to break down for you all:
“I want to start today with the new listings volume, which is notably finally climbing over last year’s anemic levels. There were 66,000 new listings this week, of which 14,000 are already in contract. That’s 14% more new listings than for the same week a year ago. Sellers are coming back to this housing market.
14,000 of those new listings are already in contract. That leaves 52,000 new listings unsold to add to inventory. That’s the most since 2020 — before the pandemic. In 2021 there were actually more total sellers, but at the peak of the frenzy, so many of those were immediate sales that they never got counted as active inventory. So the net result is that we can see sellers who sat on the sidelines a year ago, are starting to ease back in.
The takeaway here is: we can see new sellers, more than last year. It’s not a ton of sellers. But it is growing.”
You can find the whole article here.
Here is why this is important. We’ve talked in the past about this being the first market in a long time (maybe ever) where both the buyer and seller are very rate-dependent folks. It is hard to overstate the importance of seeing the seller coming out of hibernation and coming back into the market. It’s big y’all. This will create a wave-like effect where the buyers AND sellers pouring back into the market at the same time will have an amplifying impact.
In short, this combo situation will dramatically speed up the recovery, so long as the trend holds.
There will be bumps along the way and fits and starts. But this is the first sign of a real estate recovery, and the wave is just building on the horizon.