The U.S. median home price stayed near its summer peak of $350,000 and hit record-high year-over-year growth of 12.9 percent during the first week of October, according to realtor.com’s weekly housing report. The metric marks the greatest annual home price growth realtor.com has seen since it began tracking the data in 2017.
Amidst intense market demand and exceedingly low inventory, home prices show no signs of cooling moving into fall, according to data from the national real estate portal.
Although new listings were down 7 percent year over year, the drop in new sellers was not as large as the overall decrease in inventory, which was down 38 percent. Therefore, new listings are now a growing share of total listings, indicating that higher prices may be drawing more sellers to the market.
Danielle Hale | realtor.com
“While buyers would normally begin to hunker down this time of year, we expect to see an unusually high number remain in the market this fall,” realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale said in a statement. “This gives sellers a rare opportunity to get top dollar for their home outside of the prime selling season, which may be motivating some to stay in the market. However, even with record breaking prices, we’re not seeing sellers rush into the market with the same eagerness as buyers. Looking forward, a key question is whether this frenzied demand will continue into the spring or if we’ll see more balance between homebuyers and sellers.”
Although a typical fall housing market would see homesellers dropping prices in order to entice a smaller pool of buyers, that hasn’t been the case this year, as prices have continued to accelerate for 21 consecutive weeks.
Homes are selling in 53 days, 13 days faster than the same time last year, and according to realtor.com’s analysis, that’s unlikely to slow anytime soon.
According to the company’s Housing Market Recovery Index, which tracks the overall strength of the housing market compared to before the pandemic, the market continues to be stronger than it was pre-COVID. This week, the index was 110.4, just 0.2 points down from last week, but 10.4 points up from before the pandemic.
