Albuquerque Housing Market Update for Jan 2023

The home sales in January 2023 are the lowest we’ve seen since 2013. So let’s take a look at the data. Now, let’s not panic because there’s some positive signs out there. The sales are slow, but prices are holding mostly steady. But let’s look at the data.

We’re looking at the data directly from the Albuquerque Multiple Listing Services. It’s all single family, detached and attached homes. In this case, we’re looking at our sold. We’ve also got what’s for sale. We’ll go through that here in a minute.

And that’s the whole Albuquerque area. It’s the four county area. So right now we’re looking at closed sales. And this is the one that really jumps out, is 565 homes, at least at this point. It is the 3 February right now.

There may be a few more that trickle in here in the next few days, but at this point, we’re at 565 closed sales for January of 2023. That is the fewest we have to go back to 2013. I pulled up the ten year chart here so we could actually see it. And yeah, the number of closed sales have jumped down quite a bit. Now, let’s put this in perspective.

Let’s look at pending sales because I can kind of show you what happened here somewhere, right? Really May, June, July is when the interest rates really started to spike up. If you closed in April, May, you’re probably sub 4%. A lot of people were sub 4% or right around 4% at that time. What happened was interest rates really ran out.

It did scare a lot of people out of the market and priced people out of the market as well. And so starting in July, August, September, October, and then November, you can see the pendings decreased. In November in particular, we saw interest rates spike up over 7%, which again, pushed quite a few folks out of the market. However, coming now here in January, we did see an uptick in the number of pending sales, 892 in the Albuquerque area. It’s not an off the chart strong number, but it is a positive sign, a green shoot, if you will, for future activity.

Speaking of future activity, let’s also look at the number of showings per property. Not that one, actually. This one shows per listing. So this is the number, average number of showings that a property on the market gets. It did jump up again in January.

Again, another somewhat positive sign of future activity in our market. So let’s go over to back to the for Sale. We didn’t look at this yet, did we? I looked at it earlier, but yeah, homes for sale. So this is still kind of the big story.

Last year at this time, we were at an all time low number of homes that are actually active for sale on the market in Albuquerque. We are up over that. If we look here, this is the change from the same month last year, we’re up 27% or almost 28% from last year. However, we’re still down if we go back three years pre Pandemic to where is it? There it is.

January 2021, 916 homes on the market. That’s 50% less than that time. And the thing that’s interesting about that, I remember commenting on this at the beginning of 2020, end of 2019, that we were going to have a very strong 2020. And of course, we know what happened changed everything. And we had this less people putting their homes on the market through the pandemic as well as a surge in home buyers, which really drove the number of homes for sale in the market way down all time lows.

Again, we hit that last year and we’ve pulled back. But now it’s starting to do this kind of normal seasonal trend where we see less homes all the way through till the end of February, maybe into March, and then we’ll see an increase again if we follow the normal seasonal trends. All right, pricing. Pricing. Actually, you know what, let’s look at this because this is very telling.

This is number of homes coming on the market. We’re going to look at this a little bit differently. We’re going to look at this as a twelve month rolling. So what that means is, you know, annualized, how many homes are being listed for sale. Part of the reason that we really haven’t seen a, a surge in, in more homes on the market is, is this that just people aren’t listing their homes as much as they used to.

They’re staying in their homes longer. There’s a whole conversation out there in the housing econ world that I follow is a lot of these people are rate locked. If you’ve got a three, three and a half, 4% mortgage and you’re thinking, well, you know, it’s time to sell. Our home is appreciated a lot. But then they start looking and we’ve seen this anecdotally here on the team where people say, hey, I want to sell, then they start looking at what they can buy, what homes cost and what the mortgage rates are.

And they start looking at their actual cost to own. There’s a lot of people that are just kind of locked in and pretty happy. So we’re not seeing as many people turning over and selling their homes as often as we did in the past. I think this is pretty telling of where we are. And I expect this to continue through the year.

So what that means if you’re a home buyer, you got to be out there watching. You got to get with us, get a realtor that can help you. Bird dog. Keep an eye on what’s coming on the market. So you know, when it hits the market, that if it’s the one you’re ready to jump.

So many times we see people finally see the home. They’ve been looking on our website or some websites and they see a home come on the market, that’s the one, that’s the one I finally want. But it’s the first home they look at and ends up there’s ten offers on it and they just aren’t ready because it was the first home they look at. So start thinking about that. You want to get the ball rolling earlier.

And that’s also true for home sellers. So we do have, like I said, low number of homes on the market. Generally, it starts heating up in the spring, especially as soon as school gets out. So if you’re thinking of putting your home on the market, you want to start planning for it now here in February and hit that spring selling season. I think we’re going to have a strong one.

Again, that is what I see in the data and it just does seem to be setting up for that right now. Okay, prices, let’s talk about prices. So last year we’re looking at median price. So this is median sale price. This time last year, I think we’re at 301.

Yeah, 301 was the median sale price in January of last year. This year we’re at 305. So just, you know, like a 1% more. But you can see what happened from January of last year, we had this big run up, this big spike up, and then home prices did settle back in as those higher interest rates kicked in. Now don’t feel bad for these people that bogged back in April and May of last year because they’re probably locked in at a four or maybe even a sub 4% mortgage rate versus the six and six and a half and seven that maybe are in here.

So just put it all in perspective. If we look at price per square foot, which is the one I like better, because it takes out some of the variables. Again, we had this huge run up in the spring last year, peaked out, and we’ve had this pullback anywhere from one to 5%. It depends on how you measure it, but there’s definitely been a pullback, maybe three to 5%, something like that. The question is going to be what’s going to happen with the year over year?

Are we going to bottom out here again and start going up? That’s my expectation. So we’ll have to check back and see how I did. But my expectation is we’re going to bottom out on prices. Here, let me clean up this chart so we can see it better.

Okay, we’re just looking at three years instead of that big long ten year chart chart. So three year chart. You can see again the peak we’ve pulled back. I do expect this to turn and start going back up, meaning I do think home prices are going to pull back up. The question is, are we going to have the same year over year gains?

It’s going to be tough to move from where we are today to get back up to those May numbers, but we’ll see. Sorry. Getting kind of wonky there. I think that’s all I have for now. If you want to know anything about what’s going on in the market, reach out to me.

It’s Tego Venturi with the venturi realty group of Keller Williams realty. I’m at 505-448-8888. Follow us on Facebook and follow us on YouTube. Probably watching this on YouTube, so, yeah, hit subscribe. We appreciate it.

It just kind of helps get the message out. We’re really just trying to educate people on the market and the housing market because there is a lot of misinformation and more than that here. Locally in Albuquerque, we get a lot of national stories about the housing market that doesn’t really apply to us. So I really want to bring this down to the local level so you know what’s going on. Thanks for watching.

Take care.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction
00:10 Don’t Panic!
00:29 Closed Sales
01:06 Pending Sales
02:19 Shows Per Listing
02:42 Homes For Sale
04:05 New Listings
05:17 What This Means For Buyers
05:51 What About For Sellers?
06:21 Pricing
07:15 Per Sq. Foot Price
08:15 Follow Us For More Updates and Real Estate Videos!