“November saw the first annual growth in newly listed homes in 17 months,” Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale notes in her analysis.
If you look at total inventory—of both new listings and old—that’s improved, too, with the typical day in November enjoying 0.7% more homes for sale than a year earlier.
This turnaround is a big deal, “ending a four-month streak of annual inventory declines,” says Hale. Plus, seasonal housing stock in November increased by 2.4% above October levels, which is another first.
It’s actually “the first time inventory has increased this late in the fall season since our records commenced in 2016,” Hale points out.
While this fresh infusion of real estate listings is a welcome gift for buyers, they will have to pay dearly for them.
In November, homes were priced at a median of $420,000. That’s down from October’s $425,000, and up by just 1% compared with November of last year.
Although Hale maintains that the nation’s median list price has remained “relatively stable,” November’s higher mortgage rates compared with last year have increased the monthly cost of financing 80% of a typical home by 7.9%—roughly $172 more per month compared with a year earlier.
Hale says this number is “a new record on top of what was already the highest amount since Realtor.com began tracking this data in mid-2016.”
This also means that the typical homebuyer today would need to earn around $118,000 per year to comfortably afford those housing payments, up $7,100 from just a year ago.
While many sellers last year sat on the sidelines waiting for mortgage rates to drop before entering the market, that wait-and-see approach seems to have turned a corner. Now, many sellers have given up hope that rates will subside anytime soon.
