Housing & Economic Update: Numbers to Know 10/24/24

This is the latest in a series of videos with Windermere Principal Economist Jeff Tucker where he delivers the key economic numbers to follow to keep you well-informed about what’s going on in the real estate market.

Hi. I’m Jeff Tucker, the principal economist at Windermere Real Estate, and these are the numbers to know right now.

3.84 million

That’s the annualized rate of existing home sales in September, which came in below expectations. It’s also down 1% from the sales pace in August, and down 3.5% year over year.

This was a disappointing report. It’s a measure of just how frozen the real estate market still is, largely due to high interest rates discouraging sales activity.

Maybe surprisingly, the median price of existing homes sold in September climbed 3% year-over-year, up to $404,500.
That’s not a very fast pace of appreciation; in fact it’s right around the overall pace of inflation in the country right now, but the fact that it’s still positive suggests that this is a fairly balanced market.

Another indicator of a balanced market this month: inventory. There were 4.3 months of supply in September, up from 4.2 in August and even a little more than in September 2019.

So now we can finally say that buyers are not facing unusually low inventory, arguably for the first time in almost 5 years.
One final wrinkle for existing home sales: The West was the only region that bucked the downward trend!

Here in the West, sales actually rose 5.6% year over year. It’s not totally clear why but it might reflect buyers in the West reacting a little more quickly to the drop in interest rates through August and early September.

6.92%

That’s where the 30-year mortgage rate stood on Wednesday October 23rd, according to Mortgage News Daily. It’s up more than 3 quarters of a point from where it stood in early September, although it’s still down about half a point from where it was in May. There’s been a couple of sharp upward movements in rates over the last month due to a few reasons. First, the strong September jobs report and firm inflation data for September both helped to shrink the perceived risk of a recession, and a drastic rate-cutting cycle. And secondly, it does seem that uncertainty around the election, and potential higher deficits next year, are raising borrowing rates. All of that is creating a perfect storm for interest rates to rise in the last month.