Phoenix Housing Market Update: July 2022 Recap

Hello everybody and welcome to a new special edition of Merrill's Monday Market Madness. I am joined today with a special guest a co-host Lynda Yap, who is an agent on the Big Helper team at EXP realty and really excited we're gonna start bringing new agents onto the show on a regular basis and letting them share some of their market knowledge with you all as well. So Lynda, thank you so much for being here with us today. 

Thanks for having me good morning.

Yep, so if you have never seen our show before I always like to start out by just looking at a number called the month's supply of inventory and so basically it gives us a sort of an indication of how much supply is there compared to how much demand is there, you just take the number of active listings and divide it by the number of listings that have sold over the past 30 days. If no new homes were to come on the market, how long would it take at the current pace homes are selling for everything to be gone? Obviously, it's sort of an imaginary scenario but so right now we have 17,904 active listings and that's significant because back in March when we hit our kind of low water mark on listings that were about 4,000, so we are almost four and a half times more listings today than there were just back in March so inventory is obviously skyrocketing. The total number of pending listings is at 8,068 which is also significantly lower again at the high water mark we had more than 13,000 pending listings over the past 30 days we've seen 5,778 listings closed which gives us a month's supply of inventory of 3.10 which is the first time since we started this show several years ago that we've ever had a month supply inventory greater than in the 3’s.  In fact there was a while when we were as low as 0.5 months supply of inventory so the MSI number has 6x from its lowest point which basically you know probably isn't coming as a huge surprise to people the market  has more than cool cooled off isn't even the right word for it anymore it's slowed down dramatically and in the past I had talked about how the month supply of inventory number a balanced market would probably have around a four-month supply of inventory a buyer's market would have five or more months supply of inventory we're only at a 3.1 which means according to that metric we should still be in a seller's market but that's not actually the case it's not really the numbers that we're seeing and i think it's primarily because of how fast and how dramatically it has changed the the market has shifted so quickly that we are starting to see a drop in home values and average sales prices and you know interest rates obviously being higher and affordability and all those concerns that that the number being a 3.1 but but we're basically in a buyer's market at this point so i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to linda and she's going to start diving into some of our numbers.

Thanks, Merrill. So in July, we saw a number of closings of 6,161 homes. The average price was $547 3445 the average number of days on the market were 33 days so a little bit of an increase there the sale price compared to the list price was 98.7% and the total homes that either canceled or expired their listing was 2,342. 

Okay, awesome. Thanks, Lynda. So, let me put some of those numbers into context for you so again she mentioned that in July, so over the past 31 days there were 6,161 closings. Well, in June, just a month ago right there were 8,116 closings so just in one month, the total number of closings dropped by 24%.  now July is typically a little bit slower than June but not that much slower. The average price in June of this year was $592,213, Lynda just mentioned that in July it was $547,000 so we actually saw the average sales price drop 7.6% in just one month. That is staggering, it's a faster change than anyone ever could have thought could have happened. The days on market in June was 29 days in July it was 33 so we've seen that the days on market is already ticking up and the sales to list price ratio in June was 99.8%. Meaning, in June the homes that were closing got almost full price. Well, the homes that are closing in July you know 98.7% so on average homes are getting less than what the asking price is and there were only 1,751 homes that canceled or expired in June versus 2,342 that canceled in July so 600 additional homes canceled or expired in July as compared to June. Lynda's going to talk about how the July numbers for 2022 compared to the July numbers for 2021.

Yes, so in July 2021 we were in an insanely hot market, we saw 9,042 closings which are year over a year down 33%.  We saw the average price at $498,169 so we're still seeing an increase year over year close to $50,000. We saw the days on market were an average of 27 days and the sale price to list price ratio was 101.4% in July 2021 we saw 1,058 homes that either canceled or expired their listing.

Got it, thank you so much. So yeah we're seeing more than twice as many homes canceling and expiring this year as compared to last year but I do want to highlight the average price again she mentioned it but the average price in July of 2022 was $547,000. the average price in July of 2021 was $498,000. So the average price yes it dipped from June to July but compared to July of last year it's still up by about $50,000 pretty substantial amount to be up so no doubt the prices are kind of struggling right now but still up quite a bit from last year. 

The last thing I want to touch on is mortgage rates unless you're kind of well you know if you're living under a rock or maybe you just don't pay much attention to financial news the federal reserve met last week and decided to raise the federal funds rate by 75 basis points or in other words  ¾ of 1% and a lot of people have kind of been freaking out to me and you know just what I'm kind of hearing and seeing on social media and all that stuff that they think that means mortgage rates are rising ¾ of a % and that's not actually the case and it's a little confusing and if you just think oh my gosh, this is getting too complicated for me then I get it but I'm kind of a nerd and I like kind of tracking some of this stuff and I like to understand it as best that I can I'm no financial markets you know genius but I know a little bit. 

So, the federal funds rate is the rate at which huge bank financial institutions can borrow money from the federal government and its short-term loans not mortgage loans. Mortgage loan rates are set by mortgage-backed securities and basically the bond market. Well, the bond market changes in anticipation of news just like the stock market does and the anticipation had been that the fed was going to raise rates either three-fourths of a percent or an entire percentage point. So when they raised it three-fourths of a percent the markets actually reacted positively because it wasn't as dramatic as many thought it was going to be so on Friday we actually saw mortgage rates dip and I actually just checked this morning if you've watched any of the previous episodes I often share a website Freddie Mac posts about average rates its freddiemac.com but the problem with that site is they only update the rates on there once a week and I had a wonderful client turn me on to another source that updates daily called on Nerd Wallet and according to them the average rate for a 30-year fixed conventional mortgage is 4.986 percent that's the first time in a long time that we've seen it below 5 and so I know every that that sounds contradictory to a lot of people like hold on the fed raised rates but because the news was better than expected many thought it was going to be 1% when it only ended up being three-fourths of percent mortgage rates.

Actually improved so here's we've got we've got a wonderful scenario right now for home buyers it's it's not quite as beautiful for sellers uh we can still help sellers but if you're a buyer and you're like you know what i you know i don't know if right now is the best a great time to buy because prices are dipping this is the best time we've seen to buy in over 10 years for a buyer and here's why you can you can negotiate off of the list price you didn't used to be able to do that prices are eight percent lower than they were last month so you're getting a way better deal rates are lower than they've been in in a couple of months now and in most cases I mean if you're going for like a home that's got other tons of other interest maybe not but most cases we can actually get the seller to agree to give you concessions that we can use to cover your closing costs and or buy down your interest rate so sometimes let's just say we got ten thousand dollars from the seller and maybe we're using six thousand of that to cover closing costs we can use the other four thousand to buy down your mortgage rate so if you're starting at a 5 and we just put an extra 4 000 on it now you might be able to get down to I mean it depends on your loan amount but you know maybe you can get close to a 4.5 or or maybe you're at a 4.75 but that's not that's not a bad rate at all.

So this is the best time to buy that I have seen in years so if you've sort of been on the fence like whoa this is an excellent time for buyers to buy and we would love to help you out so hit us up and get in touch with us we'll be posting this on social media and emailing it to people so feel free to respond or comment if you're interested if you want to know more about the market if you have any specific questions.

Just last week I had a client and I'm going off on a tangent this was totally unplanned last week I had a client call me up and said "hey I own this investment property and it's a town home and I heard the single-family homes appreciate better than townhomes so maybe I ought to sell it and buy a single-family home instead." and I said you know what? I've heard that too but I don't know whether it's true. Let's run the numbers, I ran the numbers over the past like six years and we found that the town homes and condos in his area had actually appreciated more than the single-family homes not to mention that if he were to sell the house he currently has a 3.1% mortgage he'd have to sell that get up that cheap money and finance something new at a much higher rate and just like after we looked at the numbers we're like no that would be stupid you shouldn't sell and but the point is I love doing stuff like that it's what I lived for.

So if you're curious about a little aspect of the market like that or you want to know what's happening in your neighborhood or if you want to know what average prices are doing and you want to know what the comps you want to know what the value of your home is you want to know what a buyer could you know give you for your home in this market we'd love to have those types of conversations with you so please hit us up we appreciate you watching our show and we will see you next time, thanks. Bye!