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It’s Monday November 23, 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. For the realtors in our audience, if you’re interested in using market data more skillfully with your clients, we’ve recently published an eBook on the topic. It’s super comprehensive. It’ll help you build your business as you are able to share better information to guide your clients. Click the link in the description below to get your copy.
It’s Thanksgiving and we’ll hit the data quickly.
Median home price in the US this week is $349,900 – that’s unchanged for three weeks in a row now. Prices are up 9 1/2% over last year. We only have 6 weeks until the spring market reset. Expect prices to tick back each week just a bit through December. Looks like we’ll begin 2021 with the US Median Home price about $339,000 – about 10% higher than where we started the year. Crazy stuff.
The price of the newly listed cohort finally backed off this week. These winter holiday weeks have less traffic and any new listings that come to market are priced accordingly. The median price of the new listings is $300k and will have a couple more big drops before January. You can see in the blue line here, the price of new listings is much more volatile that the market as a whole, and is much more seasonally and holiday sensitive. Any given week of the year will impact the price at which you first list your house for sale. We started the 2020 year at $250,000 before the steep climb of the first quarter. If you’ve been paying attention to the Altos data, you’ll know that all signs point to a steep price climb in the first quarter of 2021 again.
On our inventory watch, we’re down to 514,000 single family homes. Next week we have to change the Y-axis on this chart. As we’ve been saying, there are no signs of big new inventory coming to market in the spring. In fact, we’ve been watching the mortgage forbearance properties and it looks like less than 5% of these homes have been sold to resolve the forbearance agreement and fewer than 2% have been short sales or other distressed resolutions. This makes sense, because if you held on to your home this year, on average you gained 10% equity. Even if you bought your home very recently with low down payment, you’re not likely to be upside-down on your mortgage. American homeowners are in a very strong position right now.
Finally this week here’s the Days on Market chart. Average time on the market in the US for single family homes is 111 days. That’s significantly lower than normal for this time of year. October 2020 was really the peak of abnormality for demand this year. That’s why when NAR announced its seasonally adjusted sales estimation for October it was such a blowout. Compared to typical Octobers, homes were flying off the shelves. You can see the DOM number here in the dark red line starting to regain seasonal patterns. I expect 2021 to follow a much more typical curve, even if the market stays hot. Interestingly comparing the mean DOM, which we show here to the MEDIAN DOM, can be very telling. The median DOM reflects most of the homes turning over very quickly when the average has some garbage on the market for years for example that keeps the average much higher. Right now the median DOM is only 49 days which is much more likely to be what you’d experience if you’re buying or selling right now.
So that’s the data this week. As always, visit AltosResearch.com for full details and the latest data. Realtors – don’t forget the link to download the brand new market data eBook is below in the description. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to make sure you get these and other videos each week. Thanks friends, more next week.