Is 2023 Going to Be a Buyers or Sellers Market?

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Will 2023 Be A Buyer's Or Seller's Market_ NAR Economist Weighs In!

[00:00:00] Hey everybody. Alice Lema here, broker John L Scott in beautiful Southern Oregon, another edition of The Weekly podcast. Today we're gonna talk about how it might end up still being a seller's market starting in 2023. Dr. Lawrence, chief Economist National Association Realtors did a presentation this week and we have some of his slides and we're gonna talk about what he thinks is gonna happen, and it's very interesting.

 We're also gonna have the local stats, so it's gonna be a good one. Please watch to the end. Before we get started, let's give you a quick second to subscribe to the channel. Give us a, like, give us a thumbs up. Send this to your friends and family, text and call me if you wanna talk about your real estate stuff.

We can do that this weekend before the holidays, before you get with your friends and family. But in the meantime, 541-301-7980. Let's get onto the podcast. So inventory, is it still a sellers market for 2023? Let's look and see what [00:01:00] Dr. Lawrence Yun said this week for National Association of Realtors.

For the first slide I wanna show you, look at this from 20. 22 all the way back. You can see the baseline that NAR is using is 2 million. So when they say inventory, they're talking about how many residential properties there are available. That's what they call inventory. But you can see 2 million was considered kind of normal, and then it went up during the housing crash, it doubled, right?

That means it was a complete buyer's market and I don't know if any of you were buying and selling houses back then, but I, I was helping people and we just walked around or drove around with boxes and boxes of Kleenex in our car during that 2007 to 2011 time, there was no good news anywhere you went.

And that was because so many people were losing their houses to foreclosure, short sale. People were losing their businesses. It was terrible. But then [00:02:00] you can see down. 2012 or so, it starts going into a normal market again, and then it just kept going. So isn't this interesting? If you see 20 18, 20 19, before the Covid shutdown, we were already in a shortage of inventory and then it was exasperated by the pandemic, and now we're trying to come out of it.

But you can see the inventory is rising, but not enough to meet demand and even, I think we're in a recession, but I'm not an economist, but a lot of my friends and family think we're in a recession. And they're not economist either. It's like nobody has any money right now, but you can see that at least for housing.

It looks like we're going into start 2023 with another inventory shortage. Now, if you're in the higher price points, we talk about this all the time, if you're over 500,000, you're over 600,000 here in Southern Oregon, you're not [00:03:00] experiencing a seller's market. You're experiencing a buyer's market, especially if you're over 800, 900 or a million.

There's months and months and months of inventory. So that is a buyer's market. And those price points in the super low price points, like under 400 in southern Oregon, especially under 300, then it is a bonafide seller's market. You might have multiple offers. Still have to arm wrestle to get a property in that price point.

But I just really wanted to point out not only the historic trends for inventory, but also to show that we are still needing more houses to sell. We just still don't have enough to meet demand, especially in our area from like 200 up to maybe 550 , but pretty much in that what we call mid range. So 200 to 500. Now I also wanna show you another [00:04:00] chart that was presented by Dr. Lawrence Yu To the NAR , national Association of Realtor members that the months of supply. So I love this and it just really in one quick blink of an eye, you can see that from 2018 to 2022, the months of inventory, this has to do with days on market. We talk about this in our stats every week that days on market, tell us if we're in a buyer's market, seller's market or neutral market. And it says right here, balanced market four to six months. That means if we have days on market of 120 days to 180 days, that's kind of what they consider a normal market that it takes about that long to sell house.

I have philosophical disagreement with that, but that's a different podcast. I , I just walk around constantly thinking if you put your house on the market, even buyer's market, you should still have showings and offers in [00:05:00] your first one to two months. Four to six, but like it's a different podcast. Okay.

But here, this is very interesting. You can see we are definitely on our way back, we're back to 2019 inventory levels. It's still not enough. But what that tells us is we're off the highs for the prices, but we still have equity. We're off the lows for the number of houses to choose from. We have more houses to choose from than we did before, but was still not enough.

So here we are in the middle of what I think is a recession. A lot of us are experiencing hyperinflation and issues with all that, and the housing prices have have gone down, but not gone down very much. And we still don't have enough houses, so there you go. I find this very interesting that we're going into the 2023 spring season, possibly still with a shortage of inventory. So what does that mean? It's better time to buy now than possibly [00:06:00] next year because you, you may end up with more to choose from now, especially in the winter, you may end up with more cooperative, more motivated sellers then next year.

But if you wait until next year there's always more to choose from in the spring. A lot of people just insist on putting their houses on the market in the spring, but it's gonna be a different market. And it might, it might still be a short inventory market. We will watch every week and talk about it. And see, so there you go.

Oh, I just quickly wanted to mention our local stats. Our days on market for Josephine County are this week, 56 days on market. So that's about two months. And if point back to that chart that we just looked at, that's, that's about what it says. Isn't that interesting? So then Oregon's kind of right in line with the national trends, but Josephine County is about 56 days on market right now.

Jackson County is 49 days on market. Klamath Falls is 49 days on market this week. So [00:07:00] they're all kind of hovering outside of that 30 day mark going onto the two month mark. Quite frankly, it's coordinating with the national standard. Fancy that, we're right in line with everybody else. Also just wanted to point out that for our year to date sales in Josephine County, we have over $510 million worth of residential property sold in Josephine County.qq

So far this year, Jackson County, we have over 1.5 billion with a B billion with a b, in Jackson County so far in 2022. And Klamath Falls has over 320 million. These are residential sales year to date. So we're still selling a lot of houses and it's very satisfying to help people through this crunchy time.

 Sell a house, buy a house, get situated for the rest of, what they see their real estate time for [00:08:00] these properties. Yeah, it's super exciting. Not super easy, but when it does come together, this is great. The prices are a little bit lower. We don't have as many multiple offers. But we're still getting it done and people please still put your house on the market.

Go back and, and watch the last few minutes of what we just talked about. Look at the charts and have some confidence that you could put your house on the market and still get it sold. We do have to be careful about pricing right now. We can't blue sky it anymore. It's not that kind of a market, but if you wanna move and there's places you wanna go, and houses you wanna look at, it's a good time . Not always the case.

Okay. So there you go. That's our podcast for the week. Please reach out 541-301-7980 If you need any help with your real estate stuff this weekend. Have a beautiful, beautiful Thanksgiving with your friends or family or by yourself, if that's what you choose to do. And yeah, make it a Greek week hug those you love.

We'll see you next time. Bye.