A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with Christine Ward who is an agent in Boise. Idaho has built a team over the last decade or so and built a really big business. We were talking about the changing market, what to expect this year, how can we know what's happening? What's going to happen with our buyers and sellers. And as I was recounting, as I do and we'll do today about the 2018 period when mortgage rates last spiked, what I really noticed was she sat back and her eyes opened up and she said, “oh, we could feel it in 2019.”
That's really what we can expect right now. We could feel it, the market notably slowed as rates climb. We had fewer multiple offers. Most markets didn't have prices adjust down, but it was notably harder to sell for that period of time as rates adjusted.
And that's really what we are in for later this year, not catastrophe, but we should feel it. Sellers should know it. Buyers should feel more opportunities. Christina's a data driven realtor and she produces her videos each week.
What we're going to do with you today is talk about the elements, what to expect. We're going to look at the leading indicators, how to talk to our clients right now about this Spring market for buyers and sellers. We're going to spend some time today on the inventory changes and what our forecast for the future of inventory is looking like. We'll talk about prices. We're not even to the peak of the home buying and selling season. But there's a lot of fear going on.
So we want to use the data to help lay those fears. Then we'll dive into the local markets: we'll look at Boise, we'll see where Boise is right now.
I'm Mike Simonson. I'm the CEO of Altos research. at Altos, we track every home for sale in the country every week. We analyze all the pricing, all the changes in pricing, all the supply and demand. We do these analytics make them available to you before you see them in the traditional data channels.
So it's now the middle of April. We're going to dive in and we're going to start with the current situation, which is our mortgage rates. But as we look at each of the data points, what I'm going to try to point out are the leading indicators so that you can know what to keep your eyes on in the national markets, as well as your local markets to understand how rapidly the market's changing: where it's surprising us, maybe hotter or colder than we might see.
All right, let's dive in and start looking at mortgage interest rates. That's the last time rates spiked was 2018. They spiked to 4.9% from 3.9 to 4.9. The market notably slowed. So Christina in Boise remembered it really abruptly. If you had your house on the market in say August of 2018, you could feel that that all of a sudden it took longer to sell. You thought it might go immediately, but it took a few weeks.
So those are the signals that we're going to look for. We're at about 4.8% broadly right now, notably the jumbo mortgages right now are pricing cheaper at about four and a half percent compared to conventional, which are more like closer to 5%. That's a function of the private markets at this moment. It'll be fascinating to see if that trend holds and what happens to demand. Does it shift to jumbo mortgages? We'll see, but that's an interesting trend. Most of the decade 4% has been our, our average 30 year mortgage rates.
So when we're above 4%, we start to feel it. Buyers know that very clearly and obviously. So we're going to compare things to that 2018, 2019 window.
Let's look at inventory. So there are 261,000 single family homes unsold on the market this week. Inventory is climbing each week now as you would expect for Spring. Inventory really adds mostly in April, May, June. We're starting that a little later. Last year, we were at the low point of the year at only 306,000. So we are fewer than we were last year at this time, but we're starting to increase a little. Versus 2018, by 2019, we had about 10% more listings than we did the year before after the rising rates. So not double, not a big wave, not any big crash, but that's where it's notable.
All of a sudden there's more competition for sellers. There's more opportunity for buyers. You can see it. That's what we're going to expect this year as well. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were at a record low. Then, because we were buying everything, active inventory just cratered the following two years. So we're still at a record low, starting to increase.
So one of the reasons that we're kind of optimistic about rising rates is that by adding a little more active inventory, a little more selection for buyers, things become less frenzied and more healthy for all participants, but a long way from anything really bearish. And that's important for all your buyers and sellers to know on both sides.
We have a forecast of what to expect for inventory as we go through the year. It usually is lowest in February and then starts climbing in March to peak at high summer, June, July, and then curve back at the end of the year. So we had this normal curve each year. But in 2020: peak pandemic. We never had any seasonality. We kept buying all the way through the winter. Inventory kept falling all year long. It took a long time before inventory started climbing at all. So now inventory's a little faster.
If the economy stays where it's roughly where we are looking right now, we can anticipate inventory to climb. So that we'll end the year at maybe 380,000 homes; slightly ahead of last year, but still almost record low. So not anywhere near back to normal, which might be a million homes on the market.
The thinking is that it will take several years of higher interest rates to help us build back anywhere close to the previous normal levels of active inventory. We should get more inventory into the year. It should take longer, but not that much more. That's a useful frame for people, because there are a lot of people who are afraid to buy right now because they're afraid they're buying at the peak.
So what we can show is that while maybe there will be more selection in the Fall, it's not like there's any signal of any crash coming. So if you find the house right now that you can afford right now, there doesn't seem to be a lot of benefit in waiting to the Fall. If you're sellers, you know that getting your inventory out now is probably better than later, you'll have a little more competition later, but it still looks like a very robust year. Right now we're looking at maybe 380,000 homes on the market.
I've got a preview here of a new product that we're testing with Altos research. Our advanced analytics platform and the advanced analytics platform will allow you to do comparisons, ask questions, dive into the data in ways that are solving problems for you and your customers.
What I've got my advanced analytics dashboard set up for right now is a comparison. The of inventory levels in all 50 states. I have real estate inventory ranked by all 50 states with spark lines. I have six months of inventory trends for each state. There are more homes for sale in Texas than there are in California, even though there's half as many people that's not unusual. Texas always has more homes for sale, but inventory hasn't really started climbing it just a tad in Texas.
So when I'm looking for leading indicators, for example, I'm going to be looking at many of the hottest markets, the investor markets. So for example, Arizona is one that I want to keep my eye on and I can see that Arizona's inventory has started climbing, but there's only five, 6,000 homes in single family homes on the market in all Arizona right now. Arizona is a high volatility market. So it's higher on the upside, but also swings lower on the downside. All of the big boom markets that we talked about a lot this year are in this same category.
When I'm looking for leading indicators, what I'm going to do is I keep my eye on all the states and I can watch and see “are any of the states turning up faster?” As of right now, we're just at the beginning of that. This is what I'm using the advanced analytics platform for. Nevada's started to increase inventory and so that's what we've got there.
We'll have more if you're an existing client. If you're interested in an invitation to early testing of our advanced analytics platform, drop a note to support at Altos and we'll put you in the queue for folks who are interested in that. There's lots more to come on that but just a quick preview about what I'm doing and what I'm using for the leading indicators. So we want to check whether I can see inventory climbing in those real boom states as an early signal for whether the market might be slowing.
All right, let's move on to the next leading indicator. This is our immediate sales tracker. Remember we're in this time where we have so many homes that they get listed. They're so many bids that they're taking offers in hours or days, and then go into contract essentially immediately. This week of the 90,000 or so new listings that hit the market 26,000 of them went into contract immediately. What we see is that as the market continues to heat up, about a third of the homes that get listed are taking offers essentially immediately.
That actually peaked two weeks ago. And this week it's 29%. So ticking down now, it's just two weeks. So it's hard to know if that's a real trend, but the leading indicator that I'm watching does shrink each week. And so fewer immediate sales means fewer bidding wars. It means fewer people in each bidding war. The inventory is going to build.
It's one place where we can see how robust the organic levels of demand really are. So the immediate sales, and in our Monday videos we talk about this, the immediate sales each week.
If you have a client who is thinking "how likely is it to get bidding wars?" All the hot markets still have tons of bidders, but maybe they're shifting from, you know, 50 bidders to 12 or five bidders on a property. It is still going to result in an immediate sale, but there'll be fewer of those. That is the leading indicator that we're going to be keeping our eye on.
We just started reporting on the pendings. So what’s really remarkable is there are more homes pending than there are active on the market, 261,000 active listings and 428,000 that are pending contract somewhere. This is unusual. Usually there's a million on the market and some amount of those are pending.
So as we watch the trends this year, we'll watch inventory climb. It's April. So inventory will climb in May and June, totally normal. And then the question is, are we adding fewer to the pendings so that inventory's climbing or are we getting more supply and keeping the pendings high as well? My suspicion is that like last year, we'll see this gap compress a little bit. So by July, we'll be very close to having the pendings and the actives very close to each other. But maybe later in the year if the purchasing rate starts to decline, we maybe get that back inverted again, where there are more active listings than pendings. It's really unusual to have more impending contract than the active set. But that's where we've been post pandemic.
Let's switch from supply side to pricing. The median price of a single family home in the US this week is $415,000. That's a record high and climbing each week. There's a stretch from January to June, each year where prices climb. Because we're in April, we can see that prices have several more weeks, eight, 10 more weeks to rise each week before they hit this summer plateau. There's a plateau in the summer before prices start to pull back in the Fall reset for the holidays, and then in January start the year's climb over again. So we've got about 10 weeks of that.
What that implies to me is that we will be at about $435,000, medium price by peak of the Summer. That'll be about a 10% year over year gain from last year, which would be holding onto all of the other things we already know about the market.
At this time, the leading index is the price of new listings. These are the homes that got listed this week. When you go to list your house, a seller and a listing agent, they're looking at all the signals around, and it may be how many buyers they know they have. It may be how many offers they know were at the last house. They know how many people went through the open home, so we know how much demand is happening. And therefore we make a decision on where to price the new listing. Like, are we going to price it a little bit higher to capture some of that demand? This happens about a month before the inventory. Then if you were to look at the homes going into contract those turn a month after that. And then the transactions complete another month later. So you've got four months of dominoes falling when you're looking at pricing.
The price of the new listings is the first of those dominoes. What we can see with that right now is that it has been super sharp up this spring. It tells us that if the new listings are getting priced higher, the ones that are on the market and the transaction prices are going to be higher later. If there is demand weakening, we will see the new listings price start to tick down before the rest of the markets.
We can look back and see it in 2018 when it trended down pretty early in the year, because that's when mortgage rates were rising. The sellers know that that's coming so they priced it down. The question is how long do the bidders that we know are out there last? How quickly do they back off and how quickly does the new price of new listings adjust down?
What we could see right now is because it's been so strong and the market has been so strong, like right up till today, we've had maybe tiny fractions of cooling, but really everything is still super, super hot for the buyers.
If you have buyers who are saying “I want to wait, maybe till the Fall because I think prices are going to adjust down.“ What we can do right now is we can look at the price of new listings and see, well, there's no signal yet that any prices are going to adjust down. They're just like the homes that are getting listed at their peak because their buyers are buying them at their peak. So that's what that leading indicator is telling us right now. It's also the one that when the buyers finally do cool off, we will be able to see it there, but it might be a while before that happens. It could be next year, for example, before we really see that change.
Next leading indicator. These are the properties with price reductions, the percent of homes on the market with price reductions. Normally you would have about a third of homes, take a price cut before they sell.
Sometimes that is strategic and intentional and saying “if I didn't take one price cut, then I underpriced my house.” Sometimes it's accidental.
That 1/3 is a national rule of thumb. It varies locally. So in a lot of the hot investor markets and a lot of the markets that have been really hot on the way up, like Boise and Arizona, those markets will commonly have 40% with price reductions and or maybe 45%. But then you get to like 50% the market's really cool. Half the stock is taking a price cut. That's because there's not enough demand out there.
They don't get an offer. So they take a price cut in May. They get an offer in June and they close in July, but we can see right now that those price cuts are happening or not happening. So we know where those transaction prices are going to take place in the future. What we can see right now is that we are at almost record few price cuts, meaning even if you're listing overpriced, you're still getting multiple offers. Some of the crazy sellers are saying, well, let's see what I get, and they're getting their offer.
Normally March is when the fewest price productions happen. Then later in the second quarter, if I listed early in the second quarter and it hasn't sold yet, now I start taking a price cut. If I get to July and I'm still on the market. Now I'm looking at school starting, so need to take a price cut. So more people take their price cuts to move the house before the end of summer. If I'm in the Fall, now, the holidays are looming and more people take price cuts to move the home. Before the holidays, then over the holidays it all resets. You get fresh inventory starting in January. So we have the fewest new price reductions at the beginning of the year.
2020 was the weird one because people bought all the way through the Winter and there were no extra price cuts. So now the question is, how quickly do we get back to normal? And my suspicion is that we get very quickly back to a much more normal, like a 30% price reductions later this year.
Mortgage rates were rising during 2018. It started fewer about 27%. It ended the highest of any of these seven years that we've got on the chart here. That's because that's where the rates were highest. That is how Christina in Boise said, “oh, I could feel the market slowing in 2018.” And that's what she was feeling. All of a sudden there's fewer buyers and there's more price cuts. So nationally it was 37% and so slightly higher than normal at that point.
Right now, we're at 17.5% and we go to 30% you're going to feel it. It's not going to be catastrophic, but your buyers and sellers are going to know it. Your sellers in particular are going to know it. So it's something to prepare them for, as this keeps ticking up, as they list their home.
It's one of the areas where you can look at the Altos data. If you prepare your seller for the market, we can say, “I want you to keep your eye on this data while we have your house list and put this report in your inbox every Monday. And so I want you to keep your eye on this data while we have your house list. If the price reductions are rising, while you have your house listed, that's the market giving us a signal. So we want to be ahead of that.”
You can actually empower your sellers to choose their own price cuts, to get ahead of the market. If they see it coming, it's a really powerful way to use the Altos data with your sellers. It's a leading indicator. So the leading indicator, like all of them right now, is that we are at record few. But you can see slight little hints of the market cooling just a bit. That's the price reductions.
The other side of that, price increases, are really an indicator of investor activity and flips. You can see it in a lot of the Texas and Georgia markets. In Arizona, where this is maybe eight or up to 10% of the market. So these are the active listings who we saw in the market recently at a lower price. They're now back on at a higher price. Last year you could see that peak last and then it started to back off because it was so nuts. This year we peaked in January. We're backing off a little bit. Because the market's been still remaining hot, there's still a lot of pent up demand. There's still a lot of people who can sell that flip into this market. But if you have investors who are working on this on that kind of plan, you might want to keep them tuned into this, to know if that's a good plan or not.
We can also see what happened in 2018, 2019 after the year of rising mortgage rates. So you could see each year the peak is higher 2018. The little peak was lower when the mortgage rates were higher. So there was still, you know, that kind of flip investor activity that would happen. Fewer of them able to do it after that year of rising mortgage rates. So you can imagine next Spring that we're going to have that opportunity for price increases, flippers are going to be significantly lower than they have been the last three years. But really what we want to look for is what to expect for early next year or later this year as rates start to impact buyers and sellers.
All right, let's do a few more data points and then we'll switch over to some local reports and we'll wrap up.
Days on market. We've got all our immediate sales and market time's been record fast. We're at only 21 days median for single family homes on the market. You can see a third of them are going immediately. Last year we were in peak frenzy, but we still had some of the market, some of the old stuff, and the wacky things that usually take a year to sell. Some of those were lingering on the market. So the median days of market was a little higher, like six weeks at this point, but it was falling rapidly last year. The peak of the market, which is normally like June in terms of timing, was 21 days.
We're at our record low, fast time on market, especially for right now. Normally you might be, you know, two and a half months, you know, 50 days, that kind of thing. And we're at 21 days right now. We’re in the time of year when market time actually tends to decline, because as the Spring buying season heats up market time usually declines from here, can't go much lower. But it'll be interesting to keep our eye on. Do we get a little counter to that effect and see that market time plateau, or even climb? If buyers are cooling off, we can see it in the days on market.
When we look at the leading indicators, there's going to be an order of them that we expect to see things go.
But it's still going to be way, way, way before you see it in any of the other headlines that close transactions, because these are transactions that haven't happened yet, right? The data is way, way before that. So that's how we're going to stack up the leading indicators and really know what's happening in the market.
Let's switch real quick to the price range, quartiles price range segments at Altos, we look at every zip code county, every, every geography in the country in four price range segments, the high end of the market may be behaving very differently from the low end. And we look for market changes. We may see it in the high end or the low end first before we see it in another part of the market. So it's going to be critical for you when you're working with clients to look at the market segments.
If you're starting to feel a change in the market, you may notice it in a price range first. The days on market is the fewest for the middle of the market a little slower at the top and a little slower at the low end. And the low end is that often, because those can be really the worst of the properties in a market. Especially if they're older. If it's a lot of new construction in a market, then then the bottom quartile may be moving fastest.
Across the country, the highest demand is right in the middle, we can see that's where people are buying. That's where the demand is. That's where the median price is now 21 days and 28. But as the market slows, does the high end slow?
First I mentioned early in the call that mortgage rates right now are less expensive for the private market jumbo loans than they are for conventional loans. So what if we have a market that is slowing for the lower end of the bottom two parts of the market segments and accelerating for the top?
I can tell you a story from 2007. In San Jose, California, where the bubble was bursting. The bubble at that point had been really fueled by the subprime mortgages and in San Jose, the subprime mortgages were all under a million bucks and they were the bottom of the market. When Lehman brothers blew up, you could no longer get a subprime mortgage, but you could still get a million dollar mortgage. So the days on market normally would be more for the expensive homes. It flipped so that you could see the ones that were the low end in San Jose were the longest. They were like 150 days where the million dollar in the most expensive homes were at like 30 days. So you can see that happen. That's what the market segments are for.
By the way, we do have an e-book. If you haven't read the e-book yet, you can go to this link. The ebook teaches you how to talk about the data, talks about the price range, segments, and how to use the data and where in your script to include it. It’s really useful for using market data in your business. If you haven't read it yet go grab that right now. It'll be really good. It works really well with our data.
Let's do a little bit of market action index, and then we're going to dive into a couple of local reports and we'll wrap it up.
That's going to be really powerful for you with your sellers, this coming Summer and Fall, especially if the sellers are maybe worried, what if we over priced? What if we don't get our offers? What if we don't get our immediate sales? What happens next?
So the technique with the market action index, you take your Altos report and you say to your clients, “Are you a big geek or a little geek? Now, if you're a big geek, you're going to have a ton of data. You're going to dive into it. But if you're just a little geek, I'm going to put this report in your inbox every Monday. I want you to look at one number. I want you to look at this market action index. This thing works like a speedometer when it’s higher. That means there's tighter inventory and greater demand when it falls. That's because your supply competition is increasing. Your buyers are decreasing.
We can look at a glance at any zip code in the country and know both where they are, what should buyers and sellers expect. Also, how is it changing? We can see it changing here. You can see last month was a little bit lighter, and we've so far this spring been accelerating things like our multiple offers. And so while we have your house listed, or while you're shopping, if you expect to have fewer or more offer more options, you keep your eye on this one number.”
We can watch the speedometer move. So 30 in this gauge is a neutral market. If it’s below 30 that's because inventory's built up. You can maybe correlate it with price declines in the future, but getting close to 30 will feel really nice to buyers.
It's been in such a record high strong sellers’ market conditions. Everybody knows that we have record few homes all across the country. We have multiple bidders, all of the things have been conspiring. So we should watch this tick down a little bit. This is great for people who may be on the fence or people who have talked about buying, but they're afraid. So we just need to nurture them with the data to say, “Hey, look, when you're ready, here's one way to stay informed, keep your eye on the market action index each month.” If it's moving to where you expect it, or what if it's moving counter to what your expectations are, what do we do then? Those are good ways to do it. So that's the market action index.
And then in context, the market action index over time. So normally your 30 to 40 would be a hot part of the market. In 2019 the peak of the summer never quite got as hot as 2018, right? That was because of our rising rates. You could see this little stretch in 2020 the last time there, the you know, people were saying, I know buyers have been waiting for years for some bubble to burst, so they could swoop in and get their opportunities. They've been just sitting on the sidelines. At the beginning of the pandemic, we really had like three weeks of that opportunity before it turned around. You could see that little sharp decline in yhe market action index, but then all of a sudden by week four or five, six it's climbing, and we could tell, before there were any headlines about it, you could already see: people are buying stuff.
It totally surprised me at the time. That little pandemic buying opportunity, the lowest point was still a seller's market. It got down to 36 at that point, then you could see the big steep rise last Spring.
So this year, what I would expect us to be not quite as high a peak and start to ease back a little bit closer to normal, and really hope that we move back closer to normal. So it's less frenzy. So buyers aren't so frustrated. None of that's healthy right now. But again, we're a long way from, from old normal. So that's one way to look at the context. So for your buyers and sellers it's “I’m going to put this in your inbox once a week. I want you to look at one number.”
All right. Speaking of that, let's switch over to some Altos reports. We'll do a few minutes of looking at the local data and we will see what we can see. I was talking to the LA times this week, and so I have the LA report up. The question on everybody's mind is, “are buyers yet reacting to higher price or to higher mortgage rates? Do we, do we, can we see it in the data yet?”
The market action index is still up in LA. It's still a strong sellers market. We had a low of price decreases at 14%, and we're now at 17%. So up on price decreases slightly, fewer, slightly more price decreases, which implies slightly easing off of the crazy demand, but still really, really few, like still really, really hot in that sense.
Inventory for LA. Normally there's 2,500 homes and, you know, we're down here at 750. So as mortgage rates climb hopefully we get up here somewhere close to normal inventory levels.
In the price range quartiles, you can see exactly where the demand is in LA. Right under a million bucks is where we have our peak time. Then the low end LA, these are hundred year old homes, those start taking longer.
I was talking with a partner in Charlotte. Charlotte's one of these that's been almost floored. But inventory wise, Charlotte's a big investor market and I'm watching inventory in Charlotte to you see if we get anywhere close to, you know, the normal levels, couple thousand single family homes: we're 365. We have fewer than last year. So starting maybe to tick up. Do higher rates really slow investor activity? Do they slow the migration? It seems unlikely to me that that higher rates will slow the migration trend much. It could be that because mortgage rates cost more on an investment property doesn't pencil out as much. So you do slightly fewer of those, and those get re listed for sale or stay on the market a little longer. Therefore inventory would build, I would expect that to happen in Charlotte.
The counter argument is that because everybody has super low rates, nobody wants to sell their home. That already is locked into super low rates. So it could be that we have places like Charlotte that don't get much inventory increase because the migration is still happening and nobody already there wants to sell. So my assumption is that inventory is going to climb, but it'll be really fascinating to see if maybe I'm wrong on that.
Demand is baked in here. Anything under a million bucks: immediate sales. But again, we watch the market turn. Maybe we see it at the high end of the market before we see it elsewhere.
Inventory in Minneapolis has not really started climbing yet. Now Minneapolis because of the weather is actually later in the season before it tends to hit its peak inventory. So we should expect that, but again, we're at record low and maybe starting to climb in Minneapolis.
Let's look at price reductions in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is normally in this 30 to 40, 50% range. When the inventory peak is done we’re starting to cut prices for the Winter, trying to move the homes before the Winter. Minneapolis had fewer price reductions last year, slightly more this year. So you can see slightly decreased demand right now. So we'll be watching in Minneapolis, how rapidly does this climb back up to its 40 for 50% range?
Let's wrap with Boise today. We started by talking about Christine Ward in Boise and how she could feel the market change in 2018. Boise is one of these areas where because there's a lot of activity, there's a lot of inbound migration. You can see 45% price reduction, 30 to 45 is not uncommon in Boise. That's because people from LA were coming in and buying anything site unseen.
As that cooled a little bit last fall, then we found out that some of that inbound migration had price sensitivity. So this year was not nearly as crazy as it was last year. How sensitive are the zoom town buyers to changes in mortgage rates? This is the leading indicator that we're going to keep our eye on.
Where is inventory in Boise? I’s low and starting to pick up a little bit, to get some more options for our buyers in Boise. The peak of the demand is over a million bucks, a million and a half takes much longer. These are brand new construction though. You can really see where the market is there. These are also bigger lots.
That's the whirlwind tour of the local data. A lot of times people we get to this point and ask, can you do my local market? And the answer is: “yes, we can do your local market.” We can do any local market in the country. So to get your local market data, go to altosresearch.com and book time with our team. It's a free consultation on your local market, how to work the data with your clients, how to talk about the data within your scripts and how to take it and put it in that listing presentation or put it in their inbox for these people. Who've maybe been sitting on the fence and they need to keep themselves aware of what's happening. What actually is changing in the market as it changes. So go to Altosresearch.com, book time of the team learn how to look at your local markets. We'll give you your local market data and you can dive in there.
Also don't forget at the Altos’ Top of Mind podcast. We're now doing these podcasts every week. They're on the YouTube channel, but also where all your podcasts are available. In the top of mind podcast, we're interviewing really great thinkers and doers leaders in the real state industry. So I'm sitting here and I can talk about the data. We talk about the data every week, but there's a lot of context about what's happening.
All right. That's all the time we have for today. We'll stick around in the chat. If there's the last few, few questions and we'll see you next month on the webinar. Thanks everybody.