Redfin: New Listings Fall 17%, Home Prices Rise 15%
(Chart courtesy of Redfin.)
Redfin, Seattle, reported the median home sale price increased 15% year over year to $321,250 for the four-week period ending Feb 21.
“The housing market is now like a Soviet-era supermarket, with most of the shelves empty,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman in remarks during Redfin’s Q4 earnings call last week. “In the week leading up to this call, demand slackened for the first time in months, probably because of cross-country snowstorms. But prior to that, the stories we heard from our agents were harrowing, juicy and bizarre. Migrations are warping the space-time continuum of small-town economies. The affordability crisis that flowed like some huge, unspent electrical charge from San Francisco to Seattle to Portland to Denver and to Boise is now reaching virtually every town in North America, bringing dazzling prosperity but also new anxieties.”
Key report findings for more than 400 U.S. metro areas during the 4-week period:
• Asking prices of newly listed homes hit a record-high of $343,961, up 11% from the same time a year ago.
• Pending home sales rose by 18% year over year. During the single week ending February 21, pending sales fell by 9% from two weeks prior. Over the same period in 2020, pending sales rose by 7%. “It’s likely that last week’s massive winter storm impacted housing market activity in many parts of the country,” the report said.
• New listings of homes for sale fell by 17% from a year earlier. Active listings (the number of homes listed for sale at any point during the period) fell by 40% from 2020 to a record low.
• 55% of homes that went under contract had an accepted offer within the first two weeks on the market, well above the 44% rate during the same period a year ago. This is another record high for this measure since at least 2012 (as far back as Redfin’s data for this measure goes). During the week ending February 21, 57% of homes sold in two weeks or less.
• 43% of homes that went under contract had an accepted offer within one week of hitting the market, up from 30% during the same period a year earlier. This is also a record high for this measure. During the week ending February 21, 44% sold in one week or less.
• The average sale-to-list price ratio, which measures how close homes are selling to their asking prices, increased slightly to 99.4%—1.6 percentage points higher than a year earlier a record high. During the week ending February 21, the ratio shot up to 99.8%, also a record high.
• For the week ending February 21, the seasonally adjusted Redfin Homebuyer Demand Index—a measure of requests for home tours and other services from Redfin agents—rose by 35% from the same period a year ago.
• Mortgage purchase applications decreased 12% week over week (seasonally adjusted) and were up 7% from a year earlier (unadjusted) during the week ending February 19. For the week ending February 25, 30-year mortgage rates increased to 2.97%, the highest level since August.
