A report from Nerd Wallet. “Michelle Doherty, a Realtor in northern Virginia, notices the same thing. Buyers ‘hold off, thinking, ‘You know what? We’ll wait for them to drop [the price].’ She prods clients to make offers below asking instead of waiting for sellers to reduce prices. The worst that sellers can say is no, she points out.”
The Oregonian. “Chris Suarez, a broker with PDX Property Group said, he also is seeing buyers regain some clout. ‘Buyers will walk, and sellers honestly need to get less stubborn,’ he said. ‘If it’s not pending, then it’s not the market, it’s you.’”
The Spectrum in Utah. “A typical Washington County home listed for $711,000 in July, down 5.1% from the previous month’s $749,500. The market added 756 new home listings in July, compared with the 608 added in July 2021. The market ended the month with some 1,528 listings of homes for sale. Across all of Utah, median home prices were $625,000, falling 3.8% from a month earlier.”
The Times Free Press in Tennessee. “‘Buyer traffic is slowing down, although seller expectations are still extremely high,’ Chattanooga Realtor Jay Robinson said. ‘I think it’s going to be an adjustment in the market that is going to continue to take place over the next three or four months.’ The number of single-family homes sold by Chattanooga Realtors in July dropped by 12.7% from the total in June while the median price of those homes sold also dropped 5.7% from the previous month.”
The News & Observer in North Carolina. “Triangle-area homes sold less quickly and for less money in July, according to new data provided to The News & Observer. That’s a trend that is expected to continue as home prices further recede from their recent record-highs, according to Matt Fowler, executive director of Triangle MLS, a real estate listings platform covering eight local counties. ‘For buyers, all the metrics show that prices appear to have peaked in the area and should become more approachable this fall and next year,’ Fowler said. Durham County saw a more substantial price drop last month, with its sales price sliding 4.5%, from $430,000 in June to $410,600.”
The South Haven Tribune. “The number of single-family home sales in June rose 43 percent in the South Haven area – 30 versus 21 – from June 2021, according to the Southwestern Michigan Realtors Association. Conversely, the average selling price for single-family homes fell 2 percent to $434,648 from $442,999 in June 2021. The median selling price for single-family homes also dropped 9 percent to $318,000 compared to $351,000 in June 2021.”
From ABC 15. “President of Arizona Realtors Gary Nelson says there is now more inventory on the market. He says within the past month, the average cost of a home in Arizona has gone down from $350,000 in June to about $340,000 in July. The Phoenix Business Journal reports for the Phoenix area specifically, costs are down from about $600,000 in June to $546,000 in July.”
From KXAN in Texas. “Austin’s housing market continues to ‘trend towards more normal and sustainable levels,’ according to the July housing report from the Austin Board of Realtors (ABoR). ‘I do expect to see some price decreases as sellers come to terms with the shifting market,’ said Ashley Jackson, ABoR president-elect. ‘As time on the market passes, a seller may feel compelled to lower their price so that they can attract a buyer.’ Median prices have decreased over the past couple of months in Travis, Williamson and Hays counties. In the city of Austin, prices were down 5% since May. Travis County prices are down 7% since May, while Williamson and Hays counties are down 5% and 4%, respectively.”
From CNBC. “Homebuilder cancellation rates have more than doubled since April, according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Texas and the broader Southwest are seeing the biggest jumps in builder cancellations, at 27% and 25%, respectively. Cancellations are also higher than the national average in Northern California and the Northwest, at 23% and 19%, respectively. Cancellations on existing homes are particularly high in Florida, which saw a massive influx of buyers during the first year of the pandemic and also saw some of the strongest home price appreciation in the nation during that time.”
“The city of Jacksonville saw the most contracts canceled in the state, about 800 agreements in July, or 29.3% of homes that went under contract. Orlando, Daytona, Palm Bay and Pensacola also saw some of the highest cancellations, in addition to Las Vegas and San Antonio.”
From Market Place. “In the short term, Daniel McCue at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said this could be a good thing for some buyers, ‘because builders will have to lower prices in the face of this declining demand.’”
From Zacks Research. “Building Permits actually bettered expectations in July: 1.674 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units were reported last month, down from a flat 1.70 million in June by -1.3%. Again, we hearken back to 2021 prints to find levels this low. If we see a silver lining in this data, it’s that homebuilders are biting the bullet and working down inventory, as housing has enjoyed a +30% increase over the last two years.”
“Whatever strength we see in this starts data is decidedly on the multi-family side, although what’s currently needed more than anything in this economy is affordable multi-family housing. Right now, the supply glut is roughly double what a normal cycle would present: 9.3 months’ supply versus 4-5 months average. We’re also seeing a record number of mortgage cancellations in the current market: 63K in July alone.”
The Los Angeles Times in California. “‘It’s turning into a buyer’s market,’ said Keith Hernandez, a real estate agent in Whittier. ‘When my buyers look at homes, they have some time to think about it now,’ said Carl Izbicki, a real estate agent in Los Angeles. ‘It’s a normal market.’ For his seller clients, that new normal might mean taking less than they could have when rates were lower. Case in point: Izbicki said he’s about to list a three-bedroom townhome in North Hollywood for $645,000. That’s 14%, or $105,000, less than what he sold an identical unit for in the same complex last year.”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “39 Thorncliffe Ave., Toronto. Asking price: $2,350,000 (May, 2022). Previous asking price: $2,195,000. (April, 2022). Selling price: $2,050,000 (June, 2022). As the market downturn gathered steam, no potential buyer felt willing to make an offer. ‘It took about three weeks to do those [preparations] and in that time, the mortgage rates went up,’ agent Lucille Chenoweth said. The price was raised to $2.35-million in May, but interest rates rose again. In June the seller accepted a low-ball $2.05-million offer.”
iNFOnews in Canada. “Sales of single-family houses in Kelowna in July were the third lowest they’ve been in 30 years. ‘Inventory is limited because there was such a high demand since we had all these people moving here in the last two years and we had so many sales,’ Colin Krieg of Krieg Family Re/Max Kelowna Real Estate told iNFOnews.ca. ‘Forty to fifty per cent were to people coming from out of Kelowna. That’s serious. Now they can’t sell their house in Vancouver or Toronto for big money so they’re not coming here anymore so our sales numbers went down.’”
“‘When it’s a hot market, it’s easy,’ Krieg said. ‘You buy first and you turn around and you know your house is going to sell overnight. That’s not the case now.’”
Daily Mail Australia. “Home prices are falling in sea change areas as interest rate rises hit regional markets a short drive away from capital cities. Idyllic towns near the beach have been popular with professionals able to work from home – but that is changing as the lending capacity of banks is constrained. The Richmond-Tweed area of northern NSW, covering Byron Bay and Ballina, has been the worst-affected house market since the Reserve Bank began raising the cash rate from a record-low of 0.1 per cent in May. In the three months to July, the median house price has plunged by 4.5 per cent to $1,034,826. It was one of 10 regional areas to suffer a quarterly fall in house values, CoreLogic data showed.”
From Fox News. “The possibility of a ‘severe downturn’ in the US housing market has increased, according to a new report from credit ratings and research agency Fitch. In the case of ‘a more pronounced’ housing downturn, Fitch analysts said home prices could fall 10% to 15% in the next few years, and housing activity could fall roughly 30% or more in the same multi-year period. ‘Only the Great Depression and the Great Recession have seen price cuts of that magnitude. If home prices actually fell 15%, we’d likely see the Pandemic Housing Boom remembered as the Pandemic Housing Bubble,’ Fortune reported.”