Home Sales Plunge, Supply Rises, Prices Drop Year-over-Year Most since 2012. Even Investors Pull Back

All-Cash sales plunge 22% as investors don’t feel like overpaying either. The 2023 version of the spring selling season is here.

 

OK, it’s spring selling season, the famously best times of the year to sell a home, because that’s when prices rise and sales rise due to hot demand from home buyers who were hiding out in the winter. But this year?

The median price of all types of previously owned houses, condos, and co-ops whose sales closed in April fell year-over-year by 1.7% to $388,800, the third month in a row of year-over-year declines, according to the National Association of Realtors. A debacle we haven’t seen since February 2012, when the market emerged from Housing Bust 1. From the peak last June, the median price declined by 6% (historic data via YCharts):

For single-family houses, the median price fell 2.1% year-over-year, the third year-over-year decline in a row, to $393,300. For condos, the median price still ticked up 0.7% year-over-year, to $348,000.

But it’s still spring selling season when prices always rise from one month to the next. Even during Housing Bust 1, the median price often rose month to month during spring selling season, and sometimes by quite a bit. And the median price in April was up from March, but that increase was smaller than the increase in April 2022 (+4.3%). Hence the larger year-over-year decline (historic data via YCharts):

Sales of all previously owned homes fell by 3.4% in April from March, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales of 4.28 million homes, solidly entrenched in the dismal levels of Housing Bust 1……

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.