Lower mortgage rates motivated some buyers to get busy last month, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the seasonal slowdown seen this time of year in metro Denver’s housing market, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
Buyers closed on 2,664 homes and condos last month, a 15.9% drop from the 3,169 homes sold in October. November closings were down 14% year-over-year and through the first 11 months of 2023, with the overall sales volume is down by nearly a fifth.
Properties took longer to sell last month, with the median number of days a listing spent on the market shooting up from 16 in October to 22 in November. A year ago, the median was 21 days.
There were 6,684 active listings available to buyers at the end of November, which is down 10.7% from October’s 7,482 and up 6.9% from the inventory available a year earlier. At the current pace of sales, the market has about 2.5 months of supply of listings.
In one of the bigger declines in the report, new listings, a signal of how motivated sellers are, dropped 29% from October and they are flat with November 2022 levels.
“It’s not that sellers don’t desire to sell their current home and move, it’s that they don’t desire to part with a low APR rate on their current mortgage and trade it for a rate that could be three to four times higher,” said Susan Thayer, a member of the DMAR Market Trends Committee member and area Realtor, in comments accompanying the report.
“Sellers who desire to sell and price their homes accordingly will find there are still plenty of buyers out there – even in the top price range of our market,” she said.
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The median or mid-point price of a single-family home sold in November was $625,000, which was down 3.1% from the median price of $645,000 in October. Even with that decline, the median sales price remains up 1.6% from a year earlier.
For condos and townhomes, the median sales price was $418,475, down 1.14% from October’s sales price of $423,300. Measured annually, the median sales price remains up 2.1%.
Libby Levinson-Katz, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and an area realtor, said that a drop in interest rates last month helped spur activity and that continued drops will boost demand going forward.
“Depending on where rates trend, we may see bidding wars return before we know it,” she predicted in comments accompanying the report.
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