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Hey, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of Merrill's Monday Morning Market Madness coming at you with a quick update regarding the Phoenix, residential housing market. A little bit of geeky numbers, and just talking about, some trends talking about what is going on so that you know what to expect. If you are in the market to buy a home, sell a home, or you are, I'm just curious about the value of your home or.

Curious about, you know, what you're seeing on the news or anything like that. Then I think you'll find this information helpful and you know, if you're not a numbers person may be really boring, but if you are a numbers person, hopefully, you'll find it really cool. So I am going to run through the same numbers that we always start with, which is a look at how many active listings there are, how many pending listings there are and how many listings.

Closed in the past 30 days. So right now we have active in our MLS 5,066 listings, which is pretty normal Monday and then next, I like to look at how many properties are under contract, which is 12,953. And then lastly, we look at how many listings have closed in the past 30 days, which is 9,518, which gives us a monthly supply of inventory of 0.53.

And the way that's calculated is we just take, you know, it's sort of like an imaginary, if no new listings came on the mark. The current pace at which homes are selling, how long would it take before everything has gone? and so, I mean, it's a hypothetical of course, but 0.53 a month. So half a month, two weeks, everything that's currently on the market would be sold if no new listings were to come on now. That's also, you know, a very normal number for a Monday.

If you want to know how geeky I am, we track these numbers every single day. So every single day, since the beginning of the year, actually we went into last year. But on this spreadsheet only since the beginning of the year, we look at how many active listings there are, how many pending listings there are, how many listings have closed in the past 30 days, and what the month's supply of inventory is.

So I'm going to just zoom in on this here a little bit more so that we can make a little bit more sense. So, you know, we started at the beginning of the year with around what? 0.63, it spiked up to 0.77 at one point and then started to fall pretty dramatically until mid-March okay. And then the middle of March, it has really leveled off.

I mean, the month's supply of inventory has just been sitting around 0.5 ish. You know, virtually, the reason why there are spikes, you might be wondering, well, why, why isn't it a steady line? And that's because of the ebb and flow of listings that are coming on the market. So typically, not a lot of homes get listed, get added on Sundays, Monday, Tuesdays.

Wednesday sellers or maybe agents like to add listings to the MLS on Thursdays and Fridays. So we always see a surge of listings going on the market, Thursdays, Fridays, but not a lot goes under contract.  Thursday through Sunday. Or Thursday through Saturday. Cause a lot of sellers to want to wait.

They might already have offers right away, but a lot of sellers want to wait through the weekend because they've got a lot of shows scheduled. So what always ends up happening is we get a lot of, you know, the listing count goes up, on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturday. And then it starts to go down pretty dramatically on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, as all of those homes that got offers over the weekend start getting changed to being under contract.

So, so that's the reason why we have the spikes, but as you can see, really, since the middle of March, we have been very stable for, in terms of months, supply of inventory. Now 0.53, a balanced market would have probably somewhere around a five-month supply. If you wanted home prices to stay level and not really go up.

Well, you would have around a five-month supply, we have a 0.5 months supply. and if you have an even greater than five months supply, you might even see home values decline. but we're obviously a very long way away from that. and then again, this chart here, our blue line is how many active listings there are on the market.

Our yellow line is how many had closed in the previous 30 days. And then the red line is how many are pending. And again, the same spikes for the same reasons. And, as you can see, the active listing count has really been right around 5,000. You know, there's a minute here where it slipped under and then a minute where it's gone over and you can see it very slowly, might be trending upward, but it's not anything significant.

And I don't really think it's a SIG, you know, it's almost like a statistical. we're just seeing a lot more sellers add their homes on the market this time of year. And I think we're also seeing, because of how hot the market has been. We're seeing a surge of buyers and sellers who are like not buyers.

Excuse me. We're seeing a surge of sellers who are sometimes putting their homes on the market at ridiculous prices, just to test the market and see what let's see what happens. And,  You know, certainly, a lot of listings aren't that way. I mean, most of the listings on the market want to sell, so I don't necessarily believe, oh, we're suddenly seeing a reversal.

And even if we are, it's so subtle and inventory is so low that it will take years at this pace. Literally years it'll take prep 10 years before we would achieve a balanced market. If an inventory is going to continue to grow at that pace, a couple of the things that I really like to look at. I do like to look really regularly at Freddie Mac has this website is a public site.

Anyone can pull it up that talks about average interest rates. And, this is, you know, you can, it's kind of fun. You can go back and look at, you know, an all-time chart of interest rates. It's kind of fun to go back and look that in 1981, they were, you know, 18.6, 3% on you know, on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, but let's zoom in a little bit to more currently.

So we were down to like a 2.96. Well, that was the, oh, excuse me. At 2.94. That was our low point on May 13th. And then as of Thursday, May 20th, they only update this a couple of times a week. It ticked up to 3%. but it's still down from where it was on it. Versus where we were at 3.18%. So, still right around 3%, not a lot of fluctuation really in the rates.

I mean the lowest they have gotten at any point was, early January, we were at 2.65. So we're up, you know, a third of one-third of 1%, on the average rates right now. And, again, that's still a historically and insanely amazing rate and I don't expect it. Such a minor fluctuation in the rates to have a big impact on the market.

If rates were to climb significantly, it would have, you know, if rates rose tomorrow to four and a half percent, I do think it would hurt the market at slow slowed down a little bit because it would have a dramatic impact on affordability. But 2.9, six to 3%, is not, not going to be a big difference.

And I don't think anyone. Or very many people will choose to not buy now because the rate is for 100 to the point higher than it was last week.  one last thing that I kind of wants to end down the end on is the Cromford report. It's a really great report. A lot of agents use it and subscribe to it and they.

Put out some really fascinating metrics. And, one of the reports that they publish, is this kind of supply versus demand index and all the dots, all the dots represent a,  I believe they represent. Yeah, because we've got about 12 dots in each year. So as you can see, this goes all the way back to 2001, right?

So the red line is demand and the blue line is supplied. So in,  you know, you had this big gap in, you know, late 2004, early 2005, where the demand was 130. And the supply was only 41. So you w you know, dealt with this big gap and that caused prices to rise. But then as we all know, of course, a few years later, by 2008, you had this massive supply of 2 0 2, and demand was only at a 60.

So this kind of shaded-in area that's yellow, that is. The normal range, a norm, the index, if supply was normal and demand was normal, then we would both be at a hundred. So currently, as you can see, we've got a big gap again over here. And, you know, we've got the demand index right now is at 108. but the supply index is at an all-time low.

Well, that's old news for you guys that we've been talking about that for a long time, demand,  excuse me, supply index is at a 22.8. And so we're, that's why we're seeing prices rise. So rapidly demand is only slightly higher than normal. In fact, is within the normal range I will add. I don't know.

And I've expressed this doubt to some of my agent friends. I don't know how their demand index is calculated. I do have a theory on it that, They're just looking at, okay. How many homes close in a typical may? How many homes closed in a typical June? And I know in previous years we usually see somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 homes closed in may nine to 10,000 additional homes closing June in our MLS.

And that's what we're going to do this, this may, we'll probably see somewhere around 10,400 ish closings. We'll see, you know, we're still a few days away from the end of the month. So let's say that it's, you know, so that's only a little higher than that. But I, I do have a theory that man is a bit higher than that.

There are just not many homes available to buy. If there were suddenly 20,000 homes on the market, we would be closing more than 10,000 homes a month, but with only 5,000 active listings available, there's just not a lot available to buy. We are still seeing multiple offers on a lot of properties, but I will admit.

Demand has undoubtedly slowed down slightly from where it was in December and January when the demand index peaked at 135.1. You know, when, when we were at that point, it felt like every home had 20 offers. Now what we're seeing is every home. Five or six offers. Obviously, there are some homes that are still going to get 20 offers, but just on average, on average, it feels like homes are getting fewer offers than they were a couple of months ago.

So demand and that might have to do with affordability. Right? Prices are going up so fast. It's getting to a point where some people just aren't able to buy and they're having to continue to rent, or I don't know multi-generational living or, or what people are figuring out. So anyway, that's enough geeky numbers for you guys today.

I hope you found this information. Yeah. Full and,I don't know how to stop the, I don't know how to tell it to stop sharing my screen. Let's see. Ah, there we go. I figured it out. So,if you have any questions or you would like to know more specifically what the market is doing in your neighborhood, or you'd like an update regarding the value of your home or anything like that?

I would absolutely love to put that information together for you. If it's not obvious, I am a nerd. And I really love looking at these numbers and I really love just consulting with people. It does not matter to me if you have no interest in buying or selling a house and you just would like an update on the value of your home.

I know for me, I, I put, you know, all of the properties that we own. I put into a net worth spreadsheet every single month. And if you just need an update because you want to put it in your net worth spreadsheet, I'd be more than happy to do that. And if you're thinking about selling, I would love to meet with you as well.

So thank you so much, everyone, and have a great week. Okay.

What does this mean to you? If you're even a little bit interested in learning more about participating in the Phoenix housing market as a seller, buyer, or investor... you NEED to know this stuff! Or at least work with someone who is obsessed with the market stats. Reach out to me today so we can start working on making your real estate dreams a reality!