by Anja Wright, NYS Licensed Real Estate Broker
Happy New Year! 🥳
Many people are wondering how the Western New York real estate market will look in 2023.
Number 1. “Is it a good time for me to buy?” and 2. “Is it a good time to sell my home?” are questions we hear most often, especially every January.
The short general answers are:
1. It’s a better time to buy than last year.
2. Yes, it’s still a good time to sell your home.
“Why are we saying it’s a better time to buy than last year?”, you ask.
Well, that is because buyer competition has dipped considerably.
The benefit of rising interest rates has been a decrease in the number of buyers out looking for homes.
Consider this, at the start of 2022 mortgage financing interest rates were around 3%.
Today the rates are over 6%.
Anyone who was out searching for a home last year will testify that the home buying frenzy died down shortly after rates started to rise in late June.
Now the home search is bit more relaxed, with buyers having less of their offers rejected before making the winning offer on their dream home.
Still the major challenge for buyers remains a lack of good housing inventory, which leads to our next point.
Yes, it’s still a good time to sell your home in Western New York.
Why?
It’s simple, housing inventory remains at record lows.
For many reasons, the housing shortage continues, and this trend has carried on for years both nationally and locally.
The age old factors of supply and demand continue to give sellers the edge.
In a normal real estate market, the rule of thumb is that there are 6 months worth of inventory available at any given time.
In our current Western New York market, inventory levels are around 1.5 months of homes available.
To put it in more easily understandable terms, this means that after 1.5 months all the homes currently for sale can expect to be sold.
In fact, it gets even better.
The average days on market for single family homes in Western New York is 20 days.
So in under 3 weeks, half of all home sellers can expect to receive an acceptable offer and have their home sold.
Keep in mind that in 2022, the average seller of a single family home or condo received 105% or more of the list price.
Of course, each home is different and everyone’s situation is unique.
If you have any specific questions we are always here to help, and look forward to speaking with you over the coming days and months.
So are you still waiting to move in 2023?
Let’s Move!
