Buyers continue to pick up steam, market showing signs of returning to our 2013-2019 averages
Heading into our second week of 2023 we noted that buyers continued to gain momentum in their hunt for a new home. Showings overall increased by 14.5% from last week to 12,735 total showings set with and average of about 3 shows per property per week. What's interesting is that buyers are being more discerning when selecting a home to write a contract on, and are on average looking at 16 homes before going under contract. Median days on market begin to shrink as we enter our compression cycle which happens between January through April, coming in this week at 36 days.
Active inventory remains tight, dropping this week by -2.3% to 4,375 available units for sale. When comparing similar years to this cycle in January we typically have 4,580 units for sale so we are not too far off from where we should be at this time of year. Pending transactions also picked up last week increasing by 18.7% over the previous week with 813 units going under contract. New listings are also making their way to market increasing week over week by 17.0%. Sellers are not wasting time in getting their listings to market. I still firmly believe that the market will pick up directly following Super Bowl weekend whereas in the past we have seen purchase contracts increase by 40% over the previous week. The time is coming for buying and selling. I would encourage buyers to look now and get something under contract prior to February and March when inventory is at its lowest and buyer activity really starts to pick up.
The odds of selling is where I take into account all available listings for sale vs. those that go under contract and or close in the same week and project it forward for a month at a time. Due to inventory declining and buyer demand picking up the odds of selling rose week over week by 3.8% to 51.9%. In order to return to our selling cycle based on data from 2013-2019, less the pandemic years, we can expect the odds of selling to rise heading into February-April. I'm hopeful that we will land around the 60-65% odds of selling range as our market peaks in March and April.
