Metro Denver home and condo sales continued to slow and single-family home prices also dropped last month despite the relief buyers received in the form of lower mortgage rates, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors on Monday.
The number of sales in November fell to 2,877, an 18.3% decline from October and a 48.2% decline from last year. Despite fewer sales, the number of active listings fell 14.2% on a monthly basis to 6,253, as sellers pulled back ahead of the holidays.
The median price for a single-family home that sold was $615,000, a 0.92% decrease from October and a 2.5% gain over the past year. The median price of a condo or townhome rose 1.23% during the month to $410,000, a 5.13% gain from November 2021.
“While we are no longer seeing multiple offers on every listing that escalate the price way over the ask price, Denver home values remain strong and multiple offers are still absolutely happening,” said Libby Levinson-Katz, a broker with Kentwood Real Estate and chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee, which prepares the monthly report.
She also said, via email, that metro Denver still remains a “seller’s market” with less than three months of inventory in all price brackets under $750,000.
New listings were down 30.2% between October and November and they are down 28.6% from a year ago. More sellers are also “delisting” or pulling their properties from the market.
According to real estate brokerage Redfin, delistings averaged 2% a week nationally over the past 12 weeks. That’s above the 1.6% rate typically seen in November going back to 2015. Denver had a delisting rate of 2.7% per week, up from a delisting rate of 1.5% last November. That increase was the fifth highest in the country among the country’s 50 largest metros, according to Redfin.
“Some sellers are having a hard time grasping that we’re not in a housing-market frenzy anymore — it’s tough for them to swallow that they missed the boat on getting a high price,” Heather Kruayai, a Redfin real estate agent in Jacksonville, Fla., said in the report. “By the time sellers realize their listing was priced too high, it has already been on the market for too long and is considered stale.”
Listings are taking much longer to sell in metro Denver, with single-family homes spending an average of 34 days on the market, while condos and townhomes are spending 30 days, up from 15 days and 17 days respectively last year. But the median or midway point is more telling. That is now 22 days for homes and 18 days for condos, up from five days for each a year ago.
Fixed rates on 30-year home mortgage loans averaged 6.67% last week, which is down from the 7.14% rate reached in late October, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Even with the decline, rates are only back to where they were in early October and double the 3.3% rate averaged on a 30-year mortgage a year ago.
