Will home prices drop in Phoenix?? - September Housing Market Update

Good morning everyone and welcome to a new episode of Merrill's Monday Market Madness! Today, we are going to be taking a look at the Phoenix housing market. What are the trends, you probably heard inventory is rising, and prices are falling. I want to share with you the actual numbers in the actual data so that if you're a buyer or seller or thinking about being our buyer or seller, you can make an informed decision and in a minute I'll be sharing my screen and sharing some slides and some helpful information but if you're in a specific situation and you really want a better breakdown of what the market's doing in your part of town or you want an update regarding what the value of your house is or you have a specific situation and you'd like to see some data around it. I am always more than happy to chat with you about that and help in any way that I can.

I'd like to start every episode by looking at what we call our month's supply of inventory. So active on the market we have 19,575 listings right now. There are 8,516 homes that are pending or under contract and 5,622 homes that have closed in the past 30 days. So the monthly supply of inventory number we just take the active divided by the number of homes that have sold over the past 30 days and we're coming up right now with a number of 3.48. three and a half months' supply of inventory which is pretty consistent with where it's been lately in the kind of mid-threes it hasn't really been climbing too dramatically, maybe slightly. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you now and show you what this looks like. So let's share my screen here all right so I graph you know I put down onto a chart basically every day what the month supply of inventory is on that particular day and that's reflected on this chart. Here on the left and zoom in on that a little bit bigger, so as you can see we were at a low of around 0.5 months supply of inventory around April 1st and then since that time it has just absolutely skyrocketed until it hit these kinds of low to mid three range and now it's just kind of been camping out right here. 

So it's not really continuing to climb and then the other thing that's interesting is we also chart on our graph, how many active listings there are. So this blue line is our actives. So as you can see we were at a low of around April 1st we had around 4,500. In fact 1.1 like 4,200 active listings and now we're almost at 20,000 active listings. You can see it was climbing very dramatically from April 1st but then around mid-July maybe August it really stopped climbing so dramatically, it is still climbing slightly but not too bad and we're really seeing the same thing with the pending like it just really leveled out right here the closed really leveled out right there. So kind of based on what I'm seeing from all those charts it definitely looks like the market. yeah without a doubt right it slowed down inventory climbed dramatically but now everything's kind of reaching a balanced. Inventory is not skyrocketing like it was prices aren't really falling like they were.

Let me show you a couple of other charts. his is put out by a company called the prom Ford report they publish a bunch of data for the real estate in the Phoenix area and this is what's called their market index this is the people look at this chart and they want to think it's prices, it's not prices. This number that you see over here is a market index that measures how hot the market is a perfectly balanced Market one that doesn't favor buyers or sellers according to the KRON4 index would be 100 and as you can see we were at a high point this year of about 474.  and then again right around April 1st. It really took a nosedive but then right around August it really leveled out each one of these dots has a new week so as you can see last week we were 105.5 and then today we're at 105.2. So here very very balanced Market according to the KRON4 index and not really falling anywhere near the rate that it was falling before. This is a graph of how many listings in our MLS are adjusting their price or you know doing price reductions and it obviously goes way back to 2013 each bar is a new week and again almost nothing was having price reductions in January and February March started to see a few more and then right around mid-April and early May we started to see a lot. We had a high number of price reductions the week of July 24th at 4172 last week we saw 4,097.

So, you see not a huge increase in the number of homes that are reducing prices over the last two or three months as well. It's also kind of still a lot of homes reducing their prices but again there are almost 20,000 active listings. 4,000 reduced their price so roughly a fifth of all the homes that are on the market are doing price reductions right now. Now, another thing that's been coming up a lot lately because I do work with some investors and advise some investors as well, and people just kind of come to me to get thoughts and opinions and hey what is the what should this house be rented out for and that kind of thing. This is a look at the average price per foot for rental properties in our um MLS and as you can see I mean it's just been climbing super steadily right the average price per foot back in 2015 was 73 cents and then in  August of 2021, it hit a $37 and in August of 20 September 2022 is it a $36. So basically over the past year we have basically seen no change I mean you've seen some tiny little ups and downs right by a few cents per foot depending on what homes closed that month but statistically speaking I guess August of 2022 you saw a dollar 40 which was our highest price per foot but really this is also really leveling out we're not seeing massive increases in the average rents in the Phoenix market right now that rents in some areas have even fallen a little bit. A lot of that has to do with how many investors and hedge funds have bought up a ton of rental properties and now there's just a lot just like regular for-sale homes.

There are a lot more homes available to rent right now as well. Now, I think the biggest question mark regarding the market is going to be surrounding mortgage interest rates right the market really start to started to slow down when mortgage rates went crazy because it really has a negative impact on affordability it makes it hard to afford a when rates are only at 3%. You can afford a lot more houses than you can when rates are at 6%. So right now with rates being at the highest rates we've seen since 2008, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages hit a rate of 6.02 % according to Freddie Mac last week, and here you can kind of see this blue line on top is where rates have been at on a 30-year fixed rate term. So rates aren't great right now and that's going to continue to put pressure on the market for prices to possibly come down a little bit farther but if the flip side of that coin as I'm just showing you on a bunch of charts and graphs is that the market has really leveled out and even in the high five rates that we've been at. Inventory is leveling out and the market index is leveling out and price reductions are leveling out and rental prices are leveling out. So you know I don't know, we'll see what happens with the fed and what they do with inflation and all that of course a million factors that are going to have an impact on mortgage interest rates but all the indicators are the market's really leveling out right now if rates improve I would expect the market to pick up if rates get worse I would expect the market might see a little bit more of a dip and so that's kind of where we're at right now.

And a very important thing I've tried to you know I've talked about this before so if you've seen this before and I'm going to stop my screen share here so you don't get the weird window I've tried to talk about this before and it's a little complex for I think I'm just really bad at explaining it but basically you know everyone's already heard okay the inflation numbers came out bad next time the FED meets they're going to probably raise rates and they're talking about raising it as much as an entire percentage point or 100 basis points and so people assume okay well once that happens mortgage rates will go up by 1% and it's actually kind of opposite to that so mortgage rates react in advance of what the FED does base purely on speculation just like stocks do, right? If you hear that a company might have really good news or they've got an awesome new product or whatever then the speculation is the value of their shock is going to go up so people buy it ahead of time right or if the speculation is that a stock is going to go down people will dump it ahead of time before the event actually occurs well mortgage rates do the same thing so the 6% rate that we're seeing right now is basically, in my opinion, it's already reflective of the fact that the FED intends to raise rates by 100 basis points If the Fed ends up doing less than that let's say they decide you know what that's too much we're only going to do 50 or 75 points then it would probably cause mortgage rates to dip slightly. 

So all things to keep an eye on and that's where we're at on the market right now. I hope you found this information helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, 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!