The average sales price year-to-date is $201,900 and represented a 6.5% rise over 2022′s year-to-date numbers. The median sales price also grew, from $201,900 in 2022 to $215,000 through this June, a 6.5% increase.
“We don’t like to see the sales units (go) down,” said Greg Blatt, president of Dayton Realtors. “That’s always concerning, but it’s understandable at the same time because of the inventory shortages that we have, and because of (those shortages), it’s not a surprise that prices are continuing to go up because (the market has) fewer homes to choose from and the same number of buyers is supply and demand.
“You have a low supply and high demand, it’s going to drive prices forward.”
Low inventory means that some house hunters, including Centerville graduate Joseph Tyre, are having to temporarily push off their plans of buying a home. Tyre said he and his wife, Meg, sought to move back to the area from Idaho in April after he earned a bachelor’s degree in communication from Brigham Young University–Idaho.
“We didn’t want anything super fancy. We just wanted something that we could start building equity in, rather than paying the landlord,” he said. “We had all the money saved up, but every house we put an offer in on got sold to someone else.”
One of the houses the couple went to see led to them discussing it in the car afterward, he said.
“We talked it over, prayed about it, and we were like, ‘You know what? We feel really good about this house, let’s put an offer in,’ and in that moment our agent got a call and it was that the house had been taken off the market,” Tyre said.
After that happened several times in a few months, they chose to rent an apartment in Miamisburg instead.
“We’re just going to continue the process of saving up and broadening our options, so that way, when the right one does come up, we’re ready to make an offer and ready to to move forward on that process,” he said.
The drop in home sales has continued the same pattern from previous months in 2023, with a strong demand being held up by a lack of available properties, according to Dayton Realtors.
Single-family home and condominium inventory at the end of June showed 1,096 properties available, representing a supply of less than one month based on June’s pace of sales, Blatt said.
“In a stabilized market, you would have probably in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 5,000 listings active,” he said.
Sales of single-family homes and condominiums in June totaled 1,381, a nearly 13.5% decrease from the 1,596 sales reported in June 2022, the 10th consecutive month of year-over-year losses.
The median sales price in June came in at $235,000, beating last year’s figure by nearly 6.5%. The average price of $268,465 fell short of last year’s price by 4.7%.
Year-to-date listings tallied 7,890, a 20.9% drop from last year’s 9,897 listings through the end of June 2022. Listings submitted just in the month of June showed 1,562 entries, a decrease of 25% from the 2,100 listings added in June 2022.
“People are finding a house, but the problem is you get out there and you’re competing with seven, eight, nine other buyers and sometimes you get closed out even if you offer more than list price because somebody else comes in with cash or they come in with a higher price,” Blatt said.
The downside of that for a seller is sometimes that higher price doesn’t always get closed because it doesn’t always appraise out, he said.
“There’s just a lot of angst on both sides of the transaction, both buyers and sellers,” Blatt said. “While it seems like a good market for sellers because prices are up, it’s also very stressful because sometimes they don’t close because ... the house doesn’t appraise for the contract purchase price because the buyer, just to get the contract accepted, offered more than what the house is really worth.”
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