iStock illustration
A new survey from Realtor.com suggests there may yet be hope for seeing more inventory in the nation’s housing markets.
Fully 10 percent of respondents to a Realtor.com-HarrisX survey plan to sell within 12 months, the listings website’s research arm reported. If those plans come to fruition, that would generate 25 percent more listings than come on the market in a typical year.
The online survey incorporated respondents from 3,998 U.S. adults with a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points. Among those surveyed, there were 657 potential sellers with a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
“In a typical year, we see about 8 percent of the nation’s homes hit the market, and we’re expecting about 25 percent more this year,” Realtor.com senior economist George Ratiu said in a statement. “This signals that many homeowners who were wary to list during the pandemic are getting ready to do so, and this much-needed inventory – especially for starter homes – will begin to relieve buyers’ challenges in a very competitive market. Despite this good news, we were in an inventory shortage, for both new and existing homes, well before the pandemic and COVID made it worse. It’s going to take a while for us to get back to a more balanced ‘normal’ even with an increase in new construction on the horizon.”
The results underscore the challenges caused by COVID-19 and the tight housing market, the researchers said. The unusually high number of people looking to list in the next 12 months reflect the many people who held their homes off the market last year, researchers said.
In addition, of the 16 of respondents who said they wouldn’t list for another two or three years, one quarter of them said their decision was informed by the lack of homes on the market in their price range. Another 22 percent were worried about the logistics of buying and selling at the same time, while another 20 percent were worried about showing a home during the pandemic. Of all potential sellers who say they won’t list for two or three years, 91 percent said they would be more likely to list if they knew they could time buying and selling perfectly and 37 percent said they would move up their sale plans if they knew they could make a lot of money on the transaction.
Massachusetts saw an inventory bump between February and March, with 5,804 single-family homes coming on the market in March compared to the 3,401 that became available in February, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
March’s figure is still 3.8 percent lower than the number of new listings that came online in March 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit, but the numbers are “moving in the right direction,” MAR 2021 President Steve Medieros told Banker & Tradesman recently.
Redfin recently launched its iBuyer service, RefinNow, in Greater Boston’s suburbs, and is pitching its service to move-up buyers who feel “stuck” in their current home and unable to find a new place to live.
