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Home sellers are growing concerned that they could miss out on the buyer frenzy. Signs of a slowing real estate market are growing across the country—existing-home sales and new-home sales are falling as well as pending home sales.
The inventory of homes for sale rose 9% last week compared to a year ago, according to realtor.com®. New listings are rising nearly twice as fast in the past four weeks as they did a year ago.
“Rising mortgage rates have caused the housing market to shift, and now home sellers are in a hurry to find a buyer before demand weakens further,” Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, told CNBC.
Pending home sales fell for the sixth consecutive month in April and are now at the slowest pace in nearly 10 years, the National Association of REALTORS® reported Thursday.
Home sellers are seeing less competition from buyers. An index that measures buyer demand based on Redfin requests for home tours and home buying services was down 8% annually for the week ending May 15—the largest decline since April 2020, when the pandemic put everything on pause. Further, nearly one in five sellers are dropping their asking prices, which is the highest rate since October 2019, Redfin reports.
“We used to get 10 to 15 offers on most houses. Now I’m seeing between two and six offers on a house, a good house,” Lindsay Katz, a real estate broker at Redfin in the Los Angeles area, told CNBC.