Transcript
Hey, how are you? It's been too long. We're gonna do another housing market update. This is usually, one of my most popular postings that I do out here on my channel, hopefully, you’ll like this, too. We'll do a quick overview with how we finished up the year and then of course we're going to get into the prediction for 2024.
So why should you stick around? You should stick around because the last time I did a report, I absolutely nailed it, the data in real estate doesn't lie, it tells you where we're going as well as where we've been. So with that, we're going to jump right into the data. And hopefully, Learn something about where we might be seeing in 2024. So, As we saw over the summer, most houses are still selling very, very quickly.
But, not all of them, you know, if they're overpriced for whatever reason, they're not selling.. But, agents and sellers are pretty sure about what they can get for their house,so they are pricing their properties fairly competitively, as we saw over the summer.
The number of houses that are being sold is down. We actually did a little bit of a rally in in the second half of the year but still, we're down 20 percent, pretty much across the board for single families and condos which is just - It's a huge drop. If we're lucky, we'll get, you know, another five or six percent to come back this year in terms of transaction volume.
But I don't really think that we're going to see a significant increase, probably until 2025, but we'll see! I just don't - I still think that there's just too many people sitting on really low mortgages, and most of them aren't going to want to give them up to pay something else.
There are some going to be some more people out there that are interested in moving. But they're going to have to be folks that are trying to swap one mortgage for another. Let's see. So One of the things that we look for is we look for weakness in other parts of the market in order to figure out if things are going to change.
One of the places I look is rentals because if rentals are building up on the market then rental prices are going to fall. People will stop buying houses because it'll get cheaper to rent. But that's not actually what we see. Over the summer, We saw that the number of rentals was 4500 and now it's only four thousand rentals active.
That's actually down. That means that there isn't going to be any rental price relief coming in the future. That's not particularly an encouraging number. The number of single families that are active, this is December. It's the last week of December. This number isn't super, super accurate, It's really kind of a bit bigger, but based on what we're looking at over the summer, we're down a thousand houses. And over a third of the inventory is over a million, a third of the active inventory.
In terms of prices, prices were probably flat year over year.I think in spots they were up, I think maybe even on balance, they were up one percent. It's really hard to tell, where how it's doing across the entire state. But I do think in some places they were down, but in most places, I think the prices were probably up marginally, which considering the fact that interest rates, you know, basically over the last 14 months have gone from three to seven, It's unbelievable that prices are basically the same but they are. It just sort of says that there probably isn't going to be any price relief anytime soon. Not without (more) inventory. Now having said that, out of all the bad news, some of the good news is that the average days on market, for homes not sold has gone up significantly since the last time we've checked in on the report.
77 days for Worcester county for properties that are still on the market and haven't sold 100 days from Middlesex County. Now there are a lot of reasons for that and most of the resales are not in that mix. But basically, there are a few people out there that are, are trying, a lot of them are builders that are trying to get more money than the market says than they probably should, which for the last two years, has been a good strategy for them but right now the buyers are saying, “no”, that it's a bridge too far and they're not going to pay it, but some of these folks are comfortable waiting around to see if they can find that buyer.
I have to tell you, I don't think the inventory is going to help them out very much. Most of these people are going to have to cut prices and the good news about that is it tells other people who are entering on the market, what prices aren't going to work. That means more sellers, most of whom are not ready to wait a hundred days for an offer, are going to come on at reasonable prices. So once you have some price discovery about prices that don't work tells you a lot about what prices might work, and that's going to be pretty good for the market.
Going forward really quick. Here's the quick prediction. January March are unlikely to bring many sellers. Inventory numbers are super low right now. We are simply not going to see enough inventory in the next two to three months to really change that balance. So if you were hoping prices were going to be lower in the spring, I have to tell you, that's probably not the case.
There are probably going to be a lot more buyers entering the market in January and February, then sellers. And we're probably going to see a return in a lot of cases to competitive offers, you know, higher levels of traffic, and that's going to last until the spring when the sellers really start to come on.
Really, then it will depend on how many sellers do come on to see whether or not we balance. You know, towards the sellers or we balance towards the buyers, whether prices go up or whether or not prices go down. I mean more pressure from the buyers is likely because interest rates have fallen significantly in the last month and a half.
I don't think that they're going to fall a ton further, basically. Right now banks are anticipating certain cuts down the line if we get to June and the feds made a couple of cuts. They will fall a little bit more but they probably aren't going to fall a point and a half.
Basically, what's out there right now is probably what you're going to get for most of 2024. So if you're waiting for interest rates to get a lot lower, it's probably not going to happen. So you might want to be thinking about looking earlier, when optimism is good, if the FED gets a bad news and starts to take away some of that interest rates could certainly go higher from here.
At the end of the day for sellers, it's still going to be a very strong market. That's probably going to last at least until May, but it could last a lot longer, especially if rates either continue to fall or the economy continues to improve. I mean last year was not so great on the economic side, but around here, I think most people would tell you that they didn't really feel any sort of slowdown.
So until we really start to get more of the slowdown, till we get more sellers, getting their houses on the market, it's going to be another tough year for buyers just that's how it is going to be.
It's going to wrap up here. And if you're thinking about selling your house, please give me a call. I can probably give you a no visit valuation which means that i can come up with a price that's within four or five percent. Hopefully, just by talking through property and finding out what's there. And if you want to really get accurate, make sure you just let me know and I come right out to your house and get you within one percent of today's valuations again.
Pretty good data out there, not so hard for an experienced agent like myself to get you a really accurate number so that you can do the planning that you need. Either for this year or next. So if you want other information like this market report, please like and subscribe to the channel.
