Here's our local real estate market update for January 2024! If you’d like to watch instead, CLICK HERE!
Colder weather put a bit of a chill on our real estate market as we saw a decrease in active listings, home sales, and the median sale price from December! But pending sales were up as interest rates move slightly lower.
The number of active listings in our metro area in January saw a 6.76% decrease from December. We had 2746 active listings in January compared to the 2945 active listings in December. Our year over year comparison saw a 10.95% increase in our active listings as January 2023 had 2,475 active listings.
Home sales, or homes that closed in January, dipped 21.46% in January with 677 homes sold compared to the 862 sold in December. Year-over-year, there was an 13.59% increase from the 596 homes sold in January 2023.
Pending sales, showed the tenacity of those buyers still buying homes despite the freezing temperatures and formidable snow! We had 959 pending sales in January which represented a sizeable leap from the 786 pending sales in December, in fact, the leap was 22% month over month. However, pending sales decreased 13.13% when compared to the 1,104 pending sales of January 2023.
January's median sale price of $270,000 decreased by 1.80% from December’s median sale price of $274,945. I believe that decrease was due to the fact that many homes were languishing on the market without offers. It wasn’t that the homes weren’t priced fairly, but more due to the fact of a smaller pool of buyers. So, those buyers who braved the higher interest rates and the freezing temperature carved themselves out a very good purchase price and maybe even got the home at below fair market value! But even with our lower median sale price this month, January still had a generous increase of 5.88% from the $255,000 median sale price in January 2023. In fact, when I look at last year’s market updates, our highest median sale price was in June 2023 with $291,700 and the lowest was in February 2023 at $245,000. So, this month at $270,000 is still at a 10.2% increase from our lowest month last year.
Last month, homes averaged 61 days on the market, up from the 51 days homes were on the market in December and up from last year’s 52 days on average.