The housing market continues to inch back from the coronavirus pandemic.
New for-sale listings were up 12.5 percent month over month as of the seven days ending May 10 after a steep drop in April, but they remain down 27.6 percent from last year at the same period, according to Zillow’s April Real Estate Market Report released Tuesday.
“The for-sale market continues to improve and seemingly has the bottom in the rearview mirror, but rent growth has slowed significantly,” said Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow. “Housing was in a generally strong position before the pandemic, with low inventory and high prices shutting many would-be buyers out and creating unusually high demand for rentals.”
The report also found:
- Newly pending sales are up 13 percent week over week and nearly 50 percent month over month.
- Total inventory is 20 percent below last year’s level, due to the relatively low number of new listings and the increasing rate of sales.
- Newly pending sales are actually higher than last year in four large metropolitan areas – Cleveland (10 percent), Cincinnati (3.8 percent), Houston (2 percent) and Dallas-Fort Worth (0.9 percent).
Additionally, Zillow found that home values continued to climb in April – up 4.3 percent over last year to $250,492 for the typical house in the United States.