Ada County, Idaho Market Pulse Week of September 7 · from Luke Gilbert's team |
Prices came down again on the asking side, and this time both segments moved together. Resale and new construction active prices both fell, and the new construction pending number gave back the most ground of anything on the board. The one figure holding firm is resale pending price. That is the number I keep coming back to. Existing homes Resale asking prices eased to $621,997, down $5,962 from last week. There are 893 resale homes for sale, down 8. So a slightly smaller pool of homes, priced a bit lower than last week. The pending side is where it gets interesting. Resale homes going under contract came in at a median of $565,600, up $3,115. That is the rare price gain this week. But the count of pending deals dropped hard, down 42 to 567. Fewer homes went under contract, and they did so at a firmer price. My read is that the deals still closing are the well positioned ones, and the buyers on the margin are pulling back as borrowing costs climb. Pace still leans to the resale side. Active resale listings have been sitting a median of 33 days, unchanged. The homes that went under contract took a median of 18 days to get there, up 3. What buyers want still moves in under three weeks, though that window widened slightly. New construction New builds stayed the softer segment on price. Active new home asking prices slipped to $624,548, down $5,388. Builders added a touch of inventory, up 3 to 420 active listings. Those homes have been sitting a median of 65 days, up 4. That is roughly twice as long as resale sits before finding a buyer. On the pending side, new build prices came in at $647,426, down $7,512, the largest price move I see this week. The count fell to 136, down 6. Those homes took a median of 52 days to go under contract, down 1. New construction pending prices are still running higher than resale pending prices, but builders keep trimming. If I had to guess, they adjust faster than resale sellers because they carry the cost of every home that sits. The bigger picture The 30-year fixed averaged 6.76% as of September 10, per Freddie Mac. For a buyer looking at a $565,000 resale home in Meridian, that rate is the heaviest line in the monthly payment, heavier than the sticker price itself on some days. The pressure is still coming from outside our market. Energy prices tied to the Iran conflict are keeping bond yields unsettled, and mortgage rates track those yields closely. There is also talk of a Fed move this week. I am not going to guess the outcome. What I will say is that when rates push higher, sellers do the adjusting, not buyers. You can see that in this week's active price cuts across both segments. Buyers are not chasing anything right now. The resale pending price held up even as the deal count thinned by 42. That is the tension I keep sitting with. Either buyers keep paying firm for the right homes, or that thinner volume pulls the price back down next month. It is too early for me to call which way it breaks, but the direction of everything around it is pointing down, and that pending number is starting to look like it is standing alone. | |||
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Prepared for you by Luke Gilbert |