Average sales price in March totaled at $246,564, exceeding last year’s monthly figure by 6.5%. Meanwhile, the median price also saw an increase, up 8% from last year to $205,000 for the region, including Montgomery, Greene, Warren, Darke and Preble counties.
The average time a home stayed on the market was for 76 days, on average, this March, a 16% increase from a year ago when they were on the market for 65 days, according to Greg Blatt, Dayton Realtors president and the director of KW Commercial Advisors Realty.
“That’s still much quicker than a normalized market,” Blatt said. “Ninety to 120 days would be more of a normalized market. We’re still pretty fast. We’re still seeing, you know, a fairly strong seller’s market.”
Things taking longer to sell “would make sense” because of recent interest rate increase, he said.
“We have very low interest rates at 2022 and now we’re back to more normalized interest rates today, so that did slow the market just a little bit, but it didn’t slow significantly,” Blatt said.
Dayton Realtors counts days on the market from the time a property is listed until the time it closes because about 25% to 30% of all transactions fall out,” he said.
March’s tepid showing also influenced the year-to-date sales numbers. The first quarter average sales price was up 8.8% to $198,000 this year, while the average price also jumped ahead 6.5% to $235,457. Due to fewer sales so far this year, the cumulative sales price lagged by 9.5% to $660.5 million, while the number of sales saw a 15% decrease to 2,805.
Blatt said the post-holiday season drop in inventory is reversing course and trending upward.
“The question’s going to be, ‘Where are we going to peak out of?’” Blatt said. “We don’t know. They’re trending in the right direction to bring more properties on the market, which is typical for the spring market, but we’re still running below normal inventories.”
The first three months of 2023 saw increases over the previous year in prices, while sales lagged behind 2022. Through March, sales reached 2,805, down 15% from 2022 when 3,300 transactions were recorded. Sales volume showed $660 million so far, a drop of nine percent from 2022. The average sale price year-to date stood at $235,457 and represented a six percent increase over 2022′s year-to-date numbers.
Tight inventory continued in the Dayton area, contributing to the lower number of sales. Listings submitted in March numbered 1,423 entries compared to last year’s 1,720, a decrease of nearly 17.3%, according to Dayton Realtors MLS. For the January-March period, 3,529 listings were entered, down 10.1% from last year’s 3,927 listings.
The overall active MLS single-family and condominium inventory of available listings at the end of March stood at 1,013, which represented a supply of 0.8 months based on March’s pace of sales, according to Dayton Realtors.
Besides low inventories, Blatt said what is “probably still contributing to that” trend of sluggish home sales are factors he previously cited, including a recent rise in interest rates, supply-chain issues creating a shortage in new builds, worries over the economy and the effects of inflation.
A possible disturbance that could take place as early as next week is a Biden administration decree that Blatt said amounts to “imposing a tax on homebuyers.”
“They’re going to add anybody who has a (FICO) credit score higher than 680 starting May 1, they’re going to have an additional fee added onto the monthly payment to subsidize those people that have lower-than-normal credit scores,” he said. “That’s just not right. That’s punitive to the people that were responsible and doing the right thing to make sure their credit is good.
“If that goes through, and we’re hopeful that we can get a stop ... that’s going to have an impact on the sales floor.”
National Association of Realtors is “lobbying heavily” to get that executive order changed “so it doesn’t putatively harm responsible purchasers,” Blatt said.
Pat Corle, owner of Home Experts Realty, said she doesn’t believe the market will slow down that much “because there’s still buyers out there.”
“Our biggest challenge is finding listings for our buyers to buy,” said Corle, who has 30 years of experience as a Realtor. “That’s why they’re going off the market sooner than they used to.
She said real estate agents at her firm used to be able to have an open house and have six to 10 people come through to look at the house and then maybe it would take them a week to decide if they wanted it or not.
“Now people are looking at pictures and saying ‘That’s it. Let’s go buy. We can’t find anything else,’” she said.
The market seems to be settling into a price range, Corle said.
“The higher priced houses go a little slower sometimes,” she said. “Those are usually for people transferring in to the area. Our big challenge is workforce housing. People who are earning $10 to $20 an hour in their job can’t find a house and they’re living with the parents ... just because there is not enough housing startups for those individuals to buy.”
March was the seventh consecutive month of decreases in year-over year sales.
Sept.: -11.02%
Oct.: -18.64%
Nov.: -24.25%
Dec.:-24.54%
Jan.: -29.50%
Feb.:-8.17%
March: 10.63%
SOURCE: Dayton Realtors
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