There will be some outrageously terrifying headlines around home prices generated by NAR’s Existing Home Sales Report this Thursday. They will be regarding the year-over-year “median” sales price. As a reminder, in a market like this, median values are worthless. As evidence, I give you the Center for Real Studies at Wichita State University’s analysis of median sales prices:
“The median sale price measures the ‘middle’ price of homes that sold, meaning that half of the homes sold for a higher price and half sold for less. While this is a good measure of the typical sale price, it is not very useful for measuring home price appreciation because it is affected by the ‘composition’ of homes that have sold.
For example, if more lower-priced homes have sold recently, the median sale price would decline (because the ‘middle’ home is now a lower-priced home), even if the value of each individual home is rising.”
Home values are increasing month-over-month in almost every re-peat sales index (ex. Case Shiller, FHFA, Freddie Mac, Black Knight, Core Logic).
Don’t allow the consumer to be unnecessarily rattled by the headlines this week. Instead, get this information out in any way you can before and after the Thursday headlines.
Just saying…
BTW, for the cynics out there, I am not begging for retweets (though they are welcome). I don’t care if you copy and paste this information and put it out in any other form. Don’t worry about accreditation as I promise no plagiarism suits will follow.
@Theholisticpsyc As the Mom of two “therapy kids” and a grateful survivor of a long term marriage to an alcoholic (I learned alot) your messages resonate to my heart. Thank you. Really - thank you. Atlanta is home.
Expect lean inventory for sale to support prices through the summer. But if high unemployment continues into 2021, look for price declines in many markets. HPI Forecast for 12 months through April 2021 has US index down 1% and declines in 41 states.
The ‘COVID recession’ has caused a drop in housing construction and jump in withdrawn MLS listings, reducing home supply in an already tight market and nullifying some of the opportunity afforded by record low mortgage rates.
April home prices should still be up compared to last April, but the increase will be less than the 4.5% YOY growth for March. Growth will slow more in coming months; expect the CoreLogic HPI to rise 0.5% through March 2021.