Motivated sellers
Existing home sales in the US have dropped for the 12th month in a row, the longest consecutive decline on record, with the seasonally adjusted annual rate falling to just 4 million properties in January.
Even during the early days of lockdown, the housing market was more active than it is now, as higher mortgage rates continue to dent demand for would-be house-buyers. Indeed, you have to go all the way back to 2010 to find lower sales activity.
License to sell
Although existing home sales declined every month last year, it clearly wasn’t down to staffing issues at real estate agencies. At the end of 2022 there were nearly 1.6 million members of the National Association of Realtors, some 540,000 more than were registered in 2013.
However, signs are starting to emerge that slowing volumes are hurting the industry. Swathes of realtors who switched careers relatively recently, buoyed on by rising home prices in the pandemic years, have reportedly started returning to previous jobs and the January count from the NAR showed that realtor numbers had dropped 32,000.
With property exchanges down some 37% year-over-year and realtors competing for smaller slices of a shrinking market, we may have hit “peak realtor”... until the next property boom at least.
