When’s The Best Time to Buy a House?
Traditionally, according to real estate professionals on a nationwide basis, the week of September 25th to October 1st is the best time to buy a home. Notwithstanding, the pandemic happened and in some ways all bets are off. It does seem that sellers in general are not as ebullient about the current market with respect to pricing, and a good number of sellers have recently reduced their prices.
But clearly normal, or the normal that was once what we were familiar with, no longer exists and this is due to, in good part, to the huge investment that Wall Street has taken into the residential retail home marketplace. It seems that when the pandemic hit and interest rates were below 3%, Wall Street saw opportunity and decided to get into the game big time. It seems that between December 2019 to December 2021, Freddie Mac found investor home purchases climbed to 27.6%.
Some estimates put Wall Street’s total ownership of residential retail properties to be approximately 2% of the total residential market, but this is not true across the board. In regions that are sought-after single-family hotbeds, such as Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte, Wall Street has taken an aggressive position in these markets.
According to Business Insider, in 2021 investor real estate deals increased prices more than 20% on average based upon Moody’s analytics. It also impacted the average rent hitting an all-time high of $1,792. Also, the average home price, according to the same group, hit $405,000. Realtor.com came in with some other figures, which put the median home price to be $450,000 in June 2022, climbing 16.9% year-over-year.
Sellers seem to be coming into the market in greater numbers where in May 2022, the number of existing homes for sale increased for the first time since June 2019 yea-over-year. Still housing inventory did not receive any relief and on a year-over-year basis, nationwide was down 29.1%. It is yet to be seen what these higher interest rates will mean with respect to home prices, but it’s very possible that the market may begin to level off at these September levels.