Saturday 24 September 2022 07:29 PM The 20 fastest-cooling real estate markets in the US - crime ravaged West Coast ... trends now
Seattle’s housing market is slowing faster than any in the country, a new study has revealed - as cash-strapped buyers increasingly shy away from home purchases.
The study, from real estate firm Redfin, ranked the nation’s most populous hubs using metrics such as prices, price drops, and supply - and found that the real estate market is cooling fastest primarily along the West Coast.
Property prices along West Coast metropolitan areas are understood to be dipping because of a glut of properties on the market, amid a mass exodus of citizens deterred by rising mortgage rates, crime, and warnings of a looming recession.
Costly Western locales that had seen their prices swell since the pandemic, such as San Diego and San Jose, helped round out the top 20 fastest-cooling cities, based on yearly changes in prices from February to August 2022.
Also present were cities that surfaced as homebuying hotspots during the pandemic, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas, whose markets have rapidly cooled as the recently surfaced advent of remote work continues to recede.
Meanwhile, the market as a whole has swelled since going into an unprecedented freefall in recent years, as Americans look to move past the pandemic and return to their everyday lives.
With that said, Redfin's findings suggest that this recovery has been largely lost on more costly markets such as Seattle and others that straddle the Pacific, where homebuyers are feeling the effects of the rapid rise in home prices.
The study also comes a the Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its baseline interest rate by 0.75 - the fifth time since March - potentially making homebuying even pricier.
Seattle’s housing market is slowing faster than any in the country, a new study has revealed - as cash-strapped buyers increasingly shy away from home purchases
In Seattle - where the average price of a home is roughly $775,000 - approximately 34 percent fewer homes were sold within two weeks of being posted on the market than the year before, as of August 22, the study found.
This is up from a 23 percent year-over-year increase seen last February, according to the analysis - showing that the number of quick sales is rapidly decreasing, following a year of record gains in the Windy City.
Contributing to the rapid cooldown, Redfin said, for Seattle and other cities that comprised the top 20, is the country's surging mortgage rates - which rose above a record 6 percent this month.
According to the company, a monthly mortgage payment on the median-priced home in Seattle is more than $4,400 with today’s 6 percent mortgage rates - up 33 percent from the $3,300 seen earlier this year.
Also up is the city's supply of for-sale homes - which has ballooned by more than 100 percent since last year.
Those statistics suggest that Seattle buyers have more purchase options to choose from, and that homes are subsequently taking longer to sell - with prices now rising much slower than they were earlier in the year.
Costly Western locales that had seen their prices swell since the pandemic, such as San Diego and San Jose, helped round out the top 20 fastest-cooling cities, based on yearly changes in prices from February to August 2022
Tacoma, located about 35 miles south of Seattle, is also among the top 10 markets cooling fastest, the study shows, signaling that the area surrounding the pricey West Coast metro have also been affected by the recent uptick in home prices.
Seattle was followed in the rankings by Las Vegas, which emerged as a prime 'relocation' destination during and just before the pandemic, as citizens from the neighboring Golden State fed-up with high taxes, rising home costs, and natural disasters ventured eastward.
In Sin City, the price per square foot (PPSF) fell by a marked 14.5 percentage points year over year as of August. The median sale price in Vegas, meanwhile, as of last month stood at $416,000 - marking a 3 percent drop from last month alone.
Many cities on the list - including Las Vegas, Phoenix, Sacramento and North Port - served as 'relocation hotspots' during the pandemic-era shift toward remote work, with those markets now cooling fast as monetary policy tightens and workers return to the office.
With that said, almost all others listed by the Seattle-based brokerage firm were West Coast markets that have long been expensive, such as those in the tech heavy city of San Jose and scenic San Diego
Three California cities - San Jose, San Diego, and Sacramento - rounded out Redfin’s top five fastest-falling housing markets, coming in third, fourth, and fifth place, respectively.
Other cities in the Golden State to make the top ten included Bay Area hub Oakland and the nearby city of Stockton - as well as the more southern Bakersfield, which just north of Los
