Mortgage Rates, Inventory Levels & Price Reductions: New Hampshire Real Estate Update

I’m feeling visual this week! Check out the charts below to see what’s happening in the overall real estate market this week, as of November 29, 2023.

Mortgage Rates

As you can see in the chart below, rates seemed to have spiked on October 26, 2033. Since then, they have fluctuated but generally trended downward, which is great. Obviously they are quite a bit higher than in the 2020/2021 timeframe, but I really don’t see them getting back down quite that low again. It was an anomaly created by the (hopefully) once in a lifetime pandemic situation. Rates coming down now is a good sign, and if they can continue down toward the 5-6% range I think that’d be a great spot to be for 2024.

Price Drops

The chart below shows the number of price drops that occurred from 2019 to October of 2023. As you can see, there were actually more price drops happening last year than this year, even as rates hit around 8% in 2023. This is very interesting and shows how resilient prices have remained no matter what the market throws at them. In my opinion, the main driver here is the lack of inventory. Regardless of the rates, as long as inventory remains low, prices will fluctuate but they will not drop significantly until supply increases dramatically.

Inventory Levels

Speaking of inventory, this chart goes out to the folks that have been yelling about homes “sitting” and the market “softening”. We always tend to see a slight slow down in sales during this time of year with the holidays and all. It’s also common to see more price reductions. However, regardless of everything else including mortgage rates, you can see below that while inventory has been rising, we still have a LONG way to go to get back to 2019 levels.

The crazy part is even back in 2018/2019 we had low inventory! We just didn’t know what was about to happen with the pandemic, which tanked inventory to levels unheard of prior to.

Fun Fact: this week national single family inventory rose to 569,898 homes. During the same week in 2015, there were 1,120,115 homes available!

So what does this mean?

Mortgage rates falling is good for everyone. It helps more buyers be able to afford to buy and helps sellers get more for their homes.

Price drops are definitely happening and are more common than in 2020-2021, but they are not indicating any market crash happening.

Inventory has gone up compared to pandemic levels, but still remains very low which will keep the overall market relatively competitive.

It will be a very interesting start for 2024…