Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-October

In this 2-part overview of the housing market for mid-October, I’ll discuss new and existing home inventory and sales, house prices, mortgage rates, rents and more.

Year-over-year Decline in New Listings

Here is a graph of new listing from Realtor.com’s September 2023 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report showing new listings were down about 9.1% year-over-year in September. The year-over-year decline was much smaller in August and September than in previous months, mostly because new listings collapsed in the 2nd half of 2022. From Realtor.com:

Newly listed homes were 9.1% below last year’s levels, slowing from a decline of 7.5% in August. While newly listed homes showed an unusual seasonal increase from July to August, higher mortgage rates and more typical seasonality reset the trend to a decline from August to September. Higher mortgage rates impact selling activity through homeowners feeling ‘locked-in’ to previously low rates and thus the inventory of existing homes continued to be limited this past month.

For the local markets I track that have reported so far, are show new listings were down significantly less in August and September than in the previous months.

For these areas, new listings were down 17.0% YoY. … Last month, new listings in these markets were down 18.5% YoY. The YoY decline in new listing has been getting smaller, mostly because new listings collapsed a year ago as mortgage rates increased. This is historically a low level of new listings.

Impact on Active Inventory