Pending Home Sales Sink in D-FW
Pending home sales in North Texas are sliding, and asking prices for homes are falling too. The number of homes under contract for sale in Dallas-Fort Worth was down almost 26% year-over-year as of Sunday as buyers pulled back in the face of the pandemic, according to Zillow. And the median price of homes listed for sale with area agents was 4.4% lower than at the same time last year. Zillow reported that pending U.S. home sales fell dramatically in the second half of March but have shown some signs of a recent rebound.
Nationally, the median listing price is up a scant 0.4% year-over-year, and the median selling price is about 4% higher.
“Real estate transactions and new listings have declined abruptly amidst the coronavirus pandemic, but we haven’t yet seen prices significantly affected,” Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow, said in the new report. “Buyers have pulled back in the face of new economic uncertainty, but sellers are also shying away from listing their homes in a market that was already starved for inventory, so it is possible that home prices remain insulated, at least in the short term.”
Last week, the number of new listings in the D-FW area was down more than 21% from a year earlier. And nationally, new listings were almost 38% below where they were in April 2019, Zillow researchers found. The sharp decline in inventory comes at a time when listings typically swell for the peak spring and summer buying season.
Pending home sales across the country were down more than 32%. The largest pending-sale plunges were in Pittsburgh (down 74.4%), Detroit (down 66.8%) and Los Angeles (down 58.7%).
Nationally, sales of new homes dropped 15.4% in March from February as prospective buyers sheltered in place because of COVID-19 outbreaks in major markets.
“Sales in the West and Northeast, regions hit earlier by the coronavirus outbreak and among the first to impose strict social distancing measures, fell dramatically,” Zillow economist Matthew Speakman said about the just-released new-home numbers. “With widespread shutdowns spreading to the South and other regions toward the end of March, that likely sets the market up for an even worse April. Now, with sales waning, construction projects getting shelved and homebuilders’ confidence plummeting alongside consumers’, the once-hot market for new homes has been put into a deep freeze this spring.”
While some analysts are warning of a pending drop in home prices, the National Association of Realtors says 74% of its agents report that their clients haven’t reduced listing prices to attract buyers.
“The housing market faced an inventory shortage before the pandemic,” Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun said. “Given that there are even fewer new listings during the pandemic, home sellers are taking a calm approach and appear unwilling to lower prices to attract buyers during the temporary disruptions to the economy...
