Bargains may be few and far between, but home prices have held steady during the pandemic, according to a new Zillow report.
The year-over-year median price of a home continues to grow but that rate of growth is slowing — up 5.3% to $263,408 in April and up 4.6% in May — and Zillow predicts that “sale price growth is likely to reverse course soon.”
The report added that buyers outnumber sellers, so homes on the market are selling at record speed — just 20 days on the market. That has enabled sellers to stick to their asking price. Zillow reports that 4.1% of listings in the last week of June underwent a price cut.
The median sales price in Houston was $247,463 in May, up 3.2%, which was slightly down from the year-over-year increase of 4.0% in April.
“As surprising as it might have seemed at the time, sellers who forged ahead with listing their homes this spring were richly rewarded, when buyers buoyed by record-low mortgage rates flooded their listings with offers,” said Zillow Chief Economist Jeff Tucker in the report. “Now, word is getting out that the housing market is on solid ground, so more listings are belatedly rushing to market, extending the busy spring shopping season well into summer. The huge millennial first-time homebuying wave is still cresting, pushing demand above what’s still very limited supply, so sellers are likely to find eager buyers for months or even years to come.”