Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week April 17, 2021

Our research team releases regular monthly housing trends reports. These reports break down inventory metrics like the number of active listings and the pace of the market. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we want to give readers more timely weekly updates.  Generally, you can look forward to a Weekly Housing Trends View near the end of each week along with a weekly video update from our economists. Here’s what the housing market looked like over the last week.

Our year ago data reflects the early days of the pandemic when real estate markets seized up in many areas of the country and consumers and industry struggled to adapt to the unfolding health situation. For this reason, we see large year over year trends that are an indication of the huge progress we’ve made toward normalization. Still — comparing data to 2 years ago, on the supply side, in particular, the market is lagging behind. This is why we continue to see large home price gains. Buyers who are currently struggling to find a home are likely to see improvement in the number of choices available to them as more sellers list for the spring buying season. For sellers, our research suggests that now is the best time to list to optimize for a quick sale at a good price before you have to worry about too many other sellers.

Weekly Housing Trends Key Findings

Key Findings:

• Median listing prices grew at 17.2 percent over last year, marking 36 consecutive weeks of double-digit price growth. In the second half of 2020, buyers could deftly navigate higher prices thanks to falling mortgage rates which for many meant falling monthly payments even as prices rose. As prices and mortgage rates have both risen in 2021, however, the monthly payment for the median priced home increased $100 in the last month. While rates have declined slightly in the last couple weeks and remain historically low, mortgage rates are expected to increase further later in the year. Thus, buyers who can find a home to purchase soon could lock-in a lower rate than buyers who wait until later this year.
• New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–notched a 40 percent gain adding on to last week’s 36 percent gain. As we compare to the early days of the pandemic when the spring home buying season was disrupted, we expect to see some big numbers ahead for gains in new listings. This is not only expected, it’s needed. The housing market is still relatively under supplied, and buyers can’t buy what’s not for sale. Relative to what we saw in 2017 to 2019, March 2021 was still roughly 117,000 new listings lower, adding to the pre-existing early-year gap of more than 200,000 fresh listings that would typically have come to market in January or February. Despite this week’s gain from a year ago, we’re 19 percent below the new seller activity that we saw in the same week in 2019. As the weather warms, the key weeks for selling activity are still ahead of us, and we expect to see more new listings growth. 
• Total active inventory remains 53 percent below this time last year. The total number of homes actively available for sale continues to be less than half of what we saw last year, and we’re measuring from somewhat lower early-pandemic levels. However, a bounce back in new sellers as we move into the heart of home selling season is a welcome sign for buyers. 
• Time on market was 21 days faster than last year.  Home buyers have to move quickly to submit offers early enough for consideration by sellers. These fast moving conditions can be challenging, especially for first-time home buyers. Not surprisingly then, 43 percent of potential first-time home buyers reported planning for a year or more to enter the housing market.

Data Summary

Recent Weeks:

You can download weekly housing market data from our data page.

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