The housing market has been incredibly resilient during COVID, it has thrived when other industries have nearly fallen apart. Given that we are approaching what is typically the high-point of the year for the real estate market, it’s only natural to wonder how strong the market will be this time around.
We’ve beaten this horse to death, but low inventory has resulted in soaring housing prices, new listings flying off the shelves, and a number of frustrated buyers. As of February 13, 2021, median listing prices are 12.9% higher than they were on February 13, 2020. This represents 27 straight weeks of a 10+% increase in median price when compared with the previous year. The drastic price increase can be explained, in part, by the fact that there are 23% less homes being placed on the market than there were a year ago. Near the end of January 2021, there were less than 600,000 homes available for sale. Moreover, homes are selling about 11 days faster than they were at this time last year. Notwithstanding the lack of new homes being listed, the new construction sector of the housing market has been booming for some time; we can expect inventory to increase in the near future. When inventory increases, the median price should decrease.
While we can’t predict when housing inventory will increase enough to reduce median sale prices, we don’t anticipate it will be any time soon. At the Chernov Team we understand that knowledge is power, and knowledge of how the housing market is behaving is powerful knowledge indeed. At the Chernov Team we know that whoever comes to the table most prepared leaves with the most, and the Chernov Team always leaves the table with the most.
