June 2022 Phoenix Housing Market Update

Hello, this is Merrill Jencks with the Big Helper Real Estate Group and I'm coming at you with another Merrill's Market Madness, giving you an update on what's going on in the Phoenix housing market and keeping you up to date and to speed so that you have some hyper-local content about what specifically we're seeing in our area, you know, of course, a lot of what you see on the national news or you know wherever you're getting your information from is not as hyper-local is what I can provide you with here today.

So, if you are considering selling your home or considering buying a home I think the information that I'll be able to share with you today is going to be extremely helpful and valuable. 

I'd like to start with a metric called months supply of inventory, if no new homes came on the market at the current Pace at which homes are selling, how long would it take for everything to be sold?  And, right now we're sitting at a 2.01 month supply of inventory meaning, that you know so we saw over the past 30 Days 7,314 homes close and there are currently 14,705 active listings so we just take the 14,705 and divide it by the 7,314 and that's where we'll come and put the 2.01 month supply. Now, that historically we've talked about hey a balanced Market should have a month's supply of inventory around 4 and it probably won't turn into a buyer's market until we have a month supply inventory of 5 or more and two is typically still a strong seller's market but we're kind of seeing an anomaly right now and I'm going to dive into some of those numbers with you here in a minute. The market is shifting so fast that it kind of already feels like we're in a buyer's market and we're already seeing home prices dip slightly and I'll talk to you more about what I expect that to do in the long run because no crystal ball here but just sort of talk about what we're seeing and what we think, we might continue to see in the future. 

So anyway, yeah typically buyer's market would have at least five months' supply of inventory we're only at two but what but it's just it's shifted so fast and demand has dropped so high and supply has risen so fast that many buyers are already treating this market like it is a buyer's market and that's there are certainly some very motivated sellers out there right now who are needing to sell and who are taking lower prices or who are doing big price reductions in order to get their homes sold and there are some Savvy buyers who are really waiting for the right opportunities right now. So, I want to take a look at the numbers for June for you.

So, in the month of June, we had 8,099 homes close in our MLS the average price of those homes was $591,449, and the average sold-to-list price ratio was 100%, meaning that on average people were getting the asking price that it was at at the time it went under contract not necessarily their original price but the price that it was listed at the time it went under contract and the average days on market was 29 days. Now, in May there were 8,732 closings so we saw the total number of homes in June, was about 10% fewer than what was sold in May and the average sales price in May was actually $592,000. So we actually saw the average sales price from May to June dropped by a thousand dollars, not a huge change there. Now, I happen to be looking at all of the entire MLS, I'm not narrowing that data down by saying, I'm only looking at single-family homes or I'm only looking at you know a certain set of criteria, I'm looking at everything that was in our MLS that sold and sometimes that can include you know homes that are in the far reaches of Arizona and are not really part of the Phoenix area. I subscribe to a report called the KRON Ford report and I am going to share some information from them with you because they have a little bit of a different number and I think it's you know again they calculate it a little differently I believe they're only looking at single-family homes in Maricopa and Pinal County. I'm sorry, I think they're looking at other types of properties but they're probably excluding maybe manufactured homes on leased land or a few different things so their data sets are a little differently they had the last month's average price at $600,000 falling all the way to $582,818. You can see those two numbers right here so they saw and even though they're changing the data they're seeing saw a drop in prices average prices of about $17,000. The median price is probably a better number to look at because sometimes the average can be skewed by a couple of really expensive or a couple of really inexpensive homes but the meat even the median price fell by $5,000 and the other number that is really interesting to me here is the listing success rate fell to 81%. Meaning that for the people sellers who are listing their homes, 19% of the time those are not resulting in a closed sale. 

Last quarter it was a 92% and last year was a 91% success rate so 81% is quite a bit lower success rate than what we have seen for listings in the past um the other graph that I really like to show I think it gives there's a lot of people can misunderstand this graph this is not priced this is called the market index and it's kind of a combination of um supply and demand. And, as you can see this year we peaked out in about February at 474.1 it's just an index. So, the KRON Ford report says it had a totally balanced Market would have a score of about 100 and we were in the 400s, and it has fallen all the way to a 175. It's not an issue really 175 should still be a pretty strong seller's market, the issue is that it has changed so fast and so dramatically. Now, I can add all these additional years over here so if I were to add for example 2020 and 2021, you can see that we're now below and this dip right here this was covid okay so this red line was 2020 and that is covid so that you know the sales dipped there for a minute when people didn't want to leave their houses and then obviously it just really took off and in 2021 the KRON4 index actually peaked out at 514 but those years were both weird and they were both in extremely strong Market if you go in and you start adding you know hey 2019 we're pretty much right where we were at this same time in 2019 and actually above where we were at in 2018 and 2017 and 2016 and 2015 and 2014 and slightly below where we were at in 2013,2012, 2011.

So, as you can see the market is still at the higher tier of all these if you want to call them normal markets I wouldn't even necessarily call the home prices were pretty much rising from 2011 to 2022. So these were all seller markets where we saw average prices increase and we're still above those but at the rate at which it's declining. If this trend continues, we could be below 100 within a month or two. I believe that it will probably level off soon because there's, we'll see what happens again no crystal ball here but I don't think we're this slope of this downward line that we're seeing is not likely to continue at that extreme pace forever. Obviously, pretty soon there'll be enough value in the market more buyers will start to buy we did see a slight dip in mortgage rates last week according to Freddie Mac, rates were at 5.81 and dipped down to 5.7 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage maybe not you know it's only a 10% but it is a slight move in the right direction. So hopefully, rates really stabilize and then the last report that I was going to show for today's is the number of price changes that we're seeing, so as you see this is a weekly chart of how many price reductions happened in that week and as you see for the week of June 26th we saw a basically an all-time high of price reductions at 3140 and then the median price reduction amount was $14,000 which is near the highest it looks like there was a time in 2020- 21 where some price reductions were averaging around $14,000 but there were very few so that was in 2021.

So yes, the homes were reducing their price by fifteen thousand dollars but in June of 2021 there were also only a thousand eight hundred nine hundred price reductions happening each week and now we saw $3,140 price reductions happening so obviously a lot of content here a lot to digest and to think about but certainly what we're really seeing right now is moving towards the buyer's market and a scenario where home prices are coming down slightly but I want to really stress that I still don't believe we're heading for some sort of Major Market correction or crash. I believe that part of what perpetuated the problem back in 2008 I mean you've probably already heard a lot of this but of course, we had a lot of Bad Mortgages and a lot of irresponsible lending and balloon payments and negative amortization and people who didn't have to qualify but it also got to the point where people just started walking away from their houses right, I mean there were some people who couldn't keep their house but then there were a ton of other people who just strategically chose to walk away from their houses which increased the problem even more because they were angry that their neighbor just bought their same floor plan for half of what they paid for it. 

Well, that's very unlikely to happen this time because of interest rates, let's just say that you have a house and you bought it a year ago well you already have 50 or 60 or 70,000 worth of equity on the average right, so the Market's gonna have to correct very dramatically for you to even be up to the point where the home is worth less than what you paid for it but even then you probably if you bought it a year ago you financed it at a rate around 3% so your payment is still extremely affordable in comparison to let's say the value of the house dropped by $50,000 that's not going to do you any good if you have to if you were to Let It Go for foreclosure wait three years and buy the same house theoretically at a lower price probably not likely to be at a lower price but even if it was now you finance that house at 6% or 5.7%. Your monthly payment actually goes up significantly, so I just don't think we're going to see a huge wave of foreclosures or anything like that and we might see a slight drop maybe 5%, maybe 10 but I think that's probably the most we're going to see in terms of a drop in home values in the Phoenix area so I'll continue to monitor it and keep you posted and and try to provide you with the most accurate and up-to-date data that I can but that's what I believe is going to happen so I hope you found this information helpful and I hope you all have a great day.

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!