Metro Denver’s spring home-selling season started off more like a lion than a lamb as increased listings combined with lower home prices to motivate buyers to step forward, according to an update Wednesday from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
The number of active listings for both homes and condos at the end of March was up 19.5% from February and double last year’s depressed levels. The inventory increase between February and March has averaged 7.5% in recordings going back to 1985, so the increase was significant.
Closings surged by nearly a third to 3,790 in March from February, but for the year they remain down by about 21%. New listings were up 47.5% from February, and remain down by about 15% from March 2022.
“The spring market is here and is outperforming expectations,” said Libby Levinson-Katz, chairperson of the DMAR Market Trends Committee in comments accompanying the report. “Buyers are not down and out in this market. They know the game and are coming prepared.”
Prices are down noticeably from a year ago, which has helped affordability and offset some of the impacts of higher mortgage rates. The median price of a single-family home sold in March was $620,000, a 6.1% decrease from a year earlier and a 3.3% gain from February. The median price of a condo or townhome sold was $405,750, which is down 4.4% from a year earlier and up 0.2% from February.
Listings spent a median of 10 days on the market in March, down sharply from the median of 25 days in February. The median represents the midpoint, meaning half of the new listings were claimed within 10 days, while half took longer. Levinson-Katz noted that bidding wars, which had faded, picked back up.
“Even though bidding wars have subsided from last spring, they are on the rise again for turnkey homes that are new to the market,” she said.
Mounting tech company layoffs and the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, a key lender to the tech industry, don’t appear to have unsettled buyer sentiment. But a Redfin study did find that housing markets in the western half of the country are cooling much more rapidly than those in the eastern half.
Austin, Texas, has seen the biggest downshift of all U.S. housing markets since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates last year, followed by Seattle, Phoenix, Tacoma, Wash., and Denver. Other slowing markets include Las Vegas and the California metropolitan areas of Stockton, San Jose, Sacramento and Oakland, according to an analysis from Redfin.
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