Phoenix Housing Market Year in Review

Hello and welcome to a new edition of Merrill's Monday Morning Market Madness. I'm coming at you with an update for the Phoenix area residential housing market and I wanted to speak specifically today about kind of the 2022 year in review and just kind using some historical data to talk about what all this might mean for looking forward to what do we add to what do I anticipate will happen with the housing market in the Phoenix area in 2023 and hopefully, if you're you know having any thoughts of moving in the year of 2023 my hope is to arm you with some good scientific data and metrics to help you understand where do you stand and what you might be facing in 2023.

So, let's just start by looking at what is the snapshot for what's happening in the market right now. So the number of active listings in our MLS is currently at 16,488. Pending there are 5,796. And, we have had 4,414 homes close in the last 30 days.,giving us a month's supply of inventory of 3.74 .Meaning, if no new homes came on the market if we continued selling Homes at the pace of 4,414 homes every 30 days we would expect everything to be sold in 3.74 months. Now to give that some perspective, we consider a balanced Market to have somewhere between four and five months' supply of inventory and a buyer's market would have greater than five months of Supply and a seller's market would have three or less months of Supply so we're 3.74. Means, we're pretty darn close to a balanced market right now of course we're actually seeing home values declining right now and I'll get more into that in a minute but in terms of like the the amount of inventory we have on our market right now at sixteen thousand four hundred and eighty eight it's actually uh relatively low given the population of the Phoenix area and given historically where we've been um you know in in the crash of you know 2008 2009 um at one point we had as many as you know in the 40 and 50 000 range of active listings on the market at a given time so 16 488 if we get back to the point where we're selling and nine eight thousand homes a month that's really only a two months Supply which is still extremely low so I guess what I'm trying to say is inventory is still low the number of people who are selling their home right now is um you know not high enough to support uh you know any substantial you know population growth or um or even like we'll see what happens but if interest rates go down and demand increases back to uh you know let's call it a a a normal level right now demand is lower than normal but if demand were to increase to a uh you know relatively healthy levels of you know let's call it uh you know where we're selling anywhere between seven and nine thousand homes in a given month um which I do think might happen in the spring especially if interest rates come back down into the fives which is looking like will probably happen um then then we could see inventory really starts to decline and we could see home prices start to increase again I don't think anyone is predicting home values to spike by 20 percent a year like we were seeing in 2020 and 2021 um and part of 2022 um but I wouldn't be surprised if year over year we actually see a slight increase in values now that probably won't happen right away with my home values decrease a little bit more um over the next couple of months as affordability continues to be a strong Factor but I wanted to just kind of go over like what did we see for the entire year of 2022 let's kind of do a year in review what happened in the housing market in 2022 and how does that compare to previous years so in 2022 we saw the total number of closings in our MLS at 85 834 85 000 homes sold the average price of all the homes that sold in 2022 was 500 161 thousand dollars now um compare that to 2021 there were 110 000 homes sold so 2022 actually saw 25 000 fewer closings than 2021 saw um and and the the average but here's the interesting Parts the average sales price in 2022 again was five hundred and sixty one thousand dollars the average sales price in 2021 was 494 000. so despite the slowdown in the market despite the decrease in values that we saw in 2022 um the uh the average sales price still ended up being sixty five thousand dollars higher than it had been in 2021 so still significantly higher although I'd like to add this right a lot of the volume that we saw in 2022 happened in the first half of the year um and and that is probably increasing the average sales price in fact the highest average sales price that we saw and for any given 30-day period in 2022 was actually six hundred and two thousand um so we hit 602 000 the average sales price for what we've seen over the past 30 days is currently sitting at where did I write it down it's sitting at 516 000. so we've actually seen a decrease in the average sales price from its peak so we hit our Peak average sales price back in May of 600 and 2000 it's now sitting at 516. so it decreased from our peak of of 86 000 so average prices have come down from their peak of almost 100 000 but year over year again if you look at what was the average price in 2021 compared to 2022 it's actually still substantially Higher by 65 000 higher um so but but let's go back to the total number of units so again we saw 85 000 closings in 2022. compare that to 2021 there was a hundred and ten thousand closings 2020 there were 105 000 closings 2019 there were 99 000 closings 2018 there were 96 000 closings so so by far the fewest number of closings that we've seen over the previous five-year period in fact if we go back to 2017 there were 96 000 2016 there were 89 000 2015 2015 was the last time that we saw uh a total number of closings lower than um than where we were at in 2022 20 um so sorry 2015 there were 84 000 closings and again 2022 there were 85 000 closings so the point I'm trying to make here is again we did see um you know pretty significant drop in the total number of closings a pretty significant increase in the amount of inventory on the market but again still 16 000 active listings there's not that many given the size and population and demand of Phoenix in fact you know if if the market heats up to you know the hottest levels where we were selling 10 and 11 000 homes a month we could be that inventory could be gone like that I mean it could be gone super super fast um interest rates right now uh average interest rate on the 30 year fixed rate mortgage is currently at six point two eight percent so that undoubtedly is the biggest impact you know a lot of people just choosing not to move or to continue renting or affordability it's very hard to afford the monthly payment if you don't have a big down payment and you're trying to buy the average home at 516 000. if you only have let's say five percent down so you're putting 25 000 down you're financing almost a 500 000 purchase price at a six percent rate well I didn't run those numbers beforehand but the monthly payment is well over three thousand dollars a month and it's just a monthly payment that a lot of people feel like they can't currently afford um so affordability Remains the factor and that's at the moment currently putting downward pressure on home prices in fact not only has the average sales price dropped from 602 to 516 000. right now we're seeing um somewhere around half of all the homes that are selling are actually paying concessions to the buyer you know contributing money towards the buyers closing costs or rate buy downs and the average amount of concessions is nine thousand dollars so not only have prices dropped by 86 000 the sellers also giving an additional nine thousand dollars on top of that in concessions towards the buyer so pretty significant the last note is the listing current listing success rate so meaning of all the homes that are coming on the market the the only 61 percent of them are successfully selling and 39 of them are canceling or expiring or coming off the market so so we are seeing a lot of frustrated sellers out there right now people who are trying to sell their home and they're not able to do so successfully because you know people aren't willing to give them their price so you know the interesting thing though is there's a lot of sellers who would like to sell but don't have to right and so a lot of people who are in that situation are choosing to stay put I mean think about it like this if you had your current home and it was financed at 2.75 and you're faced with the idea of selling that house and buying a new house at six percent I'm sure you would like an extra bedroom or maybe you'd like to move to a one story but the pain of whatever it is that you don't love in your current House Is Not Great enough to walk away from that 2.75 rate especially if you have to sell your house at a at a much lower price so they're sellers who they're you know of the 16 488 homes we currently have on the market how many of those sellers have to sell right and that's why we're seeing prices yeah they're coming down but they're not plummeting right because there are a lot of sellers out there who don't absolutely have to sell and they're remaining um firm on their prices and not negotiating as much as buyers want them to negotiate But ultimately I really do believe that that 2023 what we're going to see is home values um will actually increase slightly I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the year year over year we look and we see the average sales price Rose by three or four percent um but mostly it'll be pretty flat um the amount of inventory is low enough that um sellers can still sell and and Hold Steady on their prices I believe the interest rates will fall slightly um and that will improve affordability um and um so yeah kind of combining all those factors I think we're going to see a relatively flat to slightly increasing um prices this year so anyway I hope you found this information helpful if you're ever curious you want to know more about the value of your home or you want to know more about what your home might rent for or you want to know more about what's going on in your neighborhood just yesterday I had a client who wanted to know specifically hey what's going on in this specific neighborhood in this specific town and so I run the numbers this is how many homes they're selling each month in that neighborhood here's what the average sales price was in that neighborhood month over month this particular neighborhood ended up being a retirement community and what we found was interestingly we haven't seen a significant reduction in home values in that neighborhood so far possibly because in retirement communities you have a higher percentage of cash buyers so it was interesting I I I might do a study on that and see whether whether retirement neighborhoods are maintaining their values currently better than um you know non-55 plus neighborhoods um but it's all all interesting stuff and I love researching those types of things so don't ever feel like you're inconveniencing me or bothering me when you ask you know Hey Kevin some numbers or could you check on this for me because it's uh something that I really enjoy doing um so oh and if you'd like to see me discuss a specific topic on a future show um I would love to take requests on that as well so please feel free to message me those as well anyway I hope you all have a great uh great day great week great month um and uh let me know if I can do anything to help have a good 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!