In this 2-part overview of the housing market for mid-September, I’ll discuss new and existing home inventory and sales, house prices, mortgage rates, rents and more.
Year-over-year Decline in New Listings Smaller in August
Here is a graph of new listing from Realtor.com’s August 2023 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report showing new listings were down about 7.5% year-over-year in August. The year-over-year decline was much smaller in August than in July (down 20.8%). From Realtor.com:
Newly listed homes were 7.5% below last year’s levels, but this rate of decline is much improved from a decline of 20.8% in July. Some of this improvement can be attributed to rapidly dwindling listing activity late last summer through to the end of the year as sellers, ‘locked-in’ by previously lower mortgage rates, opted to wait to list their homes. However, the count of newly listed homes did increase by 3.5% from July to August. This late-summer increase in newly listed homes is seasonally unusual and while the increase was not large, an increase in newly listed homes provides more choices for buyers who have been struggling with affordability this year.
For the local markets I track that have reported so far, are show new listings were down significantly less in August than in the previous months.
For these areas, new listings were down 12.4% YoY. … Last month, new listings in these markets were down 24.9% YoY. The decline in new listing in August - for these areas - was smaller than the YoY decline for the last several months.
