Next year is forecasted to be a better year for homebuyers thanks to an increase in the supply of homes priced under $300,000, Redfin’s latest real-time housing market tracker reports.
This is largely due to a growing number of homeowners who will be in a position to sell in the upcoming year due to price growth in the low to middle price range, which translates into increased equity for a large swath of homeowners.
Median sale price has remained at approximately $274,000 for the past three months, unlike last year when prices decreased between September and November. Year over year, the median sale price increased 6.2% in November.
While home prices have held steady for the past three months, the number of homes sold fell by 21% in November and is down 5% from a year ago.
The problem isn’t that there are no buyers in the market, but rather a lack of sellers putting their homes on the market.
“A lot of buyers who didn’t find homes this summer expected to buy during the holiday season when the market usually slows down and there’s less competition, but now there are fewer homes for sale,” said Angelica Robles, a Redfin agent in San Jose, which saw one of the largest declines in home sales year over year.
It is typical to witness a month-over-month drop in home sales this time of year, but what is not normal is a decrease in the number of homes on the market.
According to the Redfin report, there was a 27.7% drop in new listings from October and a 1.5% drop in the total number of homes on the market in November from 2013, the first year-over-year drop in inventory in 2014.
And in addition to a shortage of homes for sale, there is an even greater shortage of affordable homes.
Redfin’s real-time buyer survey showed that just 11.3% of those surveyed said their biggest obstacle was “lack of homes for sale,” while 32.6% cited their biggest obstacle as “affordability in the area I want to buy.”
This is the first time since 2012 that buyers were more concerned about affordability than lack of inventory.
