Median sale price in April 2024 hit a new peak, even higher than highest sale prices in June (typically the yearly peak) of the last two years.
The flip side to that is the affordability index, which dropped to a level even lower than in 2007, before the crash of 2008. The good news is that mortgage interest rates fell yesterday, which should help some with affordability.
It wasn’t just prices that were increasing in April 2024, the real estate market data showed increases across the board. New listings were up 20.9%… driving up both pending and closed sales.
What didn’t increase was days on the market before pending as buyers eagerly bought up the new listings. In spite of the median sales price increase, percent of list price received declined ever so slightly to 99.9%.
This doesn’t mean that multiple offers are waning, however… they are on par with last year at this time, with 16.6% of properties closing with multiple offers indicated in the listing.
This wasn’t enough to deplete the inventory supply, however. After the total homes for sale fell off a cliff when the pandemic hit, inventory has been rising slightly every year.
Months supply of inventory metro-wide hit 2.0 months in April 2024… still a long way to go to get to the balanced market of 5-6 months indicated by the red line on the chart below, but at least not declining.
Breaking it out by price range, lowest supply is the $250k-$350k price range. Homes priced $1M+ hit a supply level that favors buyers rather than sellers. Condos have the largest months supply.
Many buyers are turning to new construction as the existing home supply has been so low… no doubt contributing to the year-over-year drop in months supply of new construction homes for sale. I talked to a new construction agent a couple weeks ago who said they simply are not able to keep up with demand. Don’t expect deals on new construction this year… the builder I talked to wasn’t even accepting sales contingent upon the sale of an existing home.
The figures above are based on statistics for the combined 13-county Twin Cities metropolitan area released by the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors.
Never forget that all real estate is local and what is happening in your neighborhood may be very different from the overall metro area.
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Sharlene Hensrud, RE/MAX Results – shensrud@homesmsp.com
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