Well, the first quarter of 2024 is done and gone! How is the market now in Blount County? Well, it’s picking up. New listings have been up each month since December. That’s a good thing for the overall market as we need more supply. We actually have 11% more new listings than 2023. This is a really good thing for the overall market.
Despite this increase in recent months of new listings, our overall inventory has been dropping. This is typically because of sales which we’ll see in just a minute. This could be due to expired and cancelled listings. In March there were 28 expired or cancelled listings. While this isn’t likely 100% accurate, that would mean that about 10% of the market didn’t sell and chose to not keep their home on the market. This will keep supply down. Although, some of those may have relisted right away and/or relist in April. So I don’t think it’s a huge factor right now. I think we can say we’ve officially entered the spring buying season.
Sold listings have been on a steady increase since December. We are only one sale off of the sales in March of 2023. But still down from previous years. But that uptick in sales has been able to absorb the new listing inventory. I’ll be looking to see if we beat last year’s peak which was in May. Currently January and February were higher than 2023, but March is basically the same.
This uptick in sales is of course keeping prices up. While the month over month raise in median price is minimal at just $5000 or 1.3%, it’s still down from March last year which was at $413k. Coming down to $375k is a drop of 9.2%.
What’s sort of interesting is the average price has been coming down. For those who don’t remember math class, the average price is all values totaled up and then divided by the number of homes sold. So this could really be skewed by big outliers, either one off high end luxury homes selling for $5M or by super nasty fixers selling for $50k. The median however, is just the middle price. So if you have 137 sales, it’s the price of number 68. These numbers each give a different perspective on the market. Usually the average price is higher than the median. Sometimes the spread is large sometimes the spread is not so much. Right now, the spread is only $16,000. There have only been a few times over the years that the spread has been that tight. So, it’s kind of interesting as it looks like they’re going to intersect…but I don’t think they’re going to.
On average, Mortgage rates were lower by about 0.4% so that could account for the dip in prices – less buyers and buyers being able to buy less. From March of 2023 mortgage rates went up steadily until a peak in October at around 7.8%. They’ve been dropping since then and there are predictions of it dropping further.
This rise in sales has dropped the months supply of inventory back below 2 months. So if no new homes came on the market, at the current sales rate, all the homes for sale would be sold in 1.75 months or 52 days.
So, things really appear to be moving in a typical spring/summer fashion. I don’t foresee any reason for a major change. I see prices continuing to move back up and likely to eclipses the 2023 highs, but not by much.
How does this affect your plans? How can I help you build a strategy to take advantage of current market conditions?
