Market Dashboard — important history

As I do every year, I have updated my Market Dashboard with final data from the Texas Real Estate Research Center, and a quick historical review is an important basis for the narrower focus a little later. Here’s the dashboard, with a quick discussion after:

Text included on those charts may not be legible on your device, but I want to highlight a few key features. In the top graph you can see all or part of five market cycles since the failure of the Savings & Loan business in 1989-1990. The current cycle, from 2013 to Present, has lasted much longer than the others, with listing inventories (orange line) always lower than at any time in the previous two cycles. At the same time, the number of homes sold (blue line) was higher until 2022 than in the last two cycles — more than 20 years.

In the second chart, notice that the ratio of sold listings to active listings averaged 34% for more than 30 years, even including the last three years. The last three years were unimaginable previously, with the ratio of sales to listings being over 100% from August 2020 to May 2022! We simply consumed inventory for 21 months out of 24! Anyone who participated in the market during that time experienced an extremely unbalanced seller’s market, with time on market sometimes measured in hours, dozens of offers above list price, and resulting in price escalation month after month.

That’s the key feature of the third graph, the changes of both average and median sale prices at the far right, rising far above the long-term trend-line begining in June 2020, peaking in April 2022, and finishing 2022 still far above just two years before. The median price of homes sold in the 5-county metro area was up more than $90,000 from January 2020 to December 2022!

My next post — 2022 in perspective — will highlight a few key metrics and offer a look forward for this year.