Real Estate Agents Are Seeing Fewer Home Buyers and Sellers
Almost six in 10 real estate agents say home sellers and buyers are stepping back from the housing market because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s what the National Association of Realtors finds in a new survey of its members seeking to gauge the current nationwide housing market. While most sales agents are optimistic that home sales will bounce back, for the time being they are seeing a substantial drop in business.
So far, almost three-fourths of the agents surveyed said that sellers have not cut their asking prices to move properties. But more than six in 10 Realtors say that homebuyers are already expecting a drop in home prices and less competition for properties. The median price of homes for sale in the Dallas-Fort Worth area was down 3% in March from a year ago — one of the first such declines seen in a major market, according to Realtor.com. And at the end of March, pending single-family home sales in the area were off by 10% from this time last year.
North Texas had record first-quarter home sales by real estate agents. But most of the increase came early in the year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The number of houses coming on the market is falling at a time of the year when sellers typically put their properties up for sale. In Dallas-Fort Worth the number of new home sales lists fell more than 17% in March from a year ago. During this time of year there is usually more than 70% new home sales listing between early market and April, according to a new report from Zillow.
Nationwide new home listings were down 27.1% from a year ago in the first week of April, Zillow found.
“It is clear that many would-be home sellers are adopting a wait-and-see approach as uncertainty continues to rule,” Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow, said in a statement. “Our understanding of U.S. economic conditions is changing weekly, if not daily, and early unemployment figures are striking, so it’s understandable that some are hesitant to put their home on the market. It is possible that this year’s busy home shopping season is pushed into winter as some opt to hang back but activity continues from those who need to buy or sell for a job move or another major life event,” she said. “What’s not likely is that the bulk of potential home sellers and buyers simply throw up their hands and pull back from the market entirely.”
Zillow found that the total number of active home sales listings nationwide is down 8.3% as of April 5 from a year ago. At the end of March, North Texas home sales listings with real estate agents were down about 10% from a year earlier.
The biggest declines in new home sales listings were in some markets that have been hard hit by the pandemic, including Detroit (down 64.6%) and New York (down 56.6%). While the decline in North Texas wasn’t as severe, it was significant. New home sales listings are down from a year ago by 8.7% in Houston and are 11.8% lower in San Antonio.
But in the Austin area, new sales listings on April 5 with 13.5% higher than a year earlier, Zillow found...
