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June 4, 2020

Report: U.S. housing market begins rebound from COVID-19 fallout

By Joe Cooper

Although COVID-related challenges remain, America’s home buying market likely hit its low point in mid-April as new listings and median prices began to recover to end the month, according to a new report.

The report released Thursday by real estate listing website Realtor.com shows median listing prices in the U.S. grew just 0.6% in April, the slowest year-over-year pace since 2017. New listings, meantime, plummeted 44.1% in April compared to a year ago.

Those trends were also mirrored in the Hartford metro area (Hartford, West Hartford and East Hartford), where median prices slowed to an increase of 5% (median listing price $294,000) and new listings in the area dropped 48.3%. That marked one of the largest percentage declines in new listings out of the nation's top 50 metros.

But the nation’s housing market began to recover in May, which is "setting the stage for continued growth over the summer," the report says.

In fact, median listing prices hit a new all-time high of $333,000 in May growing by 1.6% compared to the year prior, and new listings recovered by about 20 percentage points by the week of May 30, data shows. That’s good news as Realtor.com last month said that some of these metrics would likely worsen in May.

While the May data is encouraging, the report cautions that the coronavirus pandemic is still gripping the industry as homes are sitting on the market more than two weeks longer than this time last year.

In May, homes in the Hartford area recorded a year-over-year increase of 15 days on the market to an average of 61 days. The average U.S. home is selling in 71 days, and about 58 days in the country's 50 largest metros, the report says.

"May's home price data demonstrate the underlying strength of the U.S. housing market despite the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic," said realtor.com® Chief Economist Danielle Hale. "The fact that home prices are at an all-time high shows that the momentum the market had prior to the pandemic has helped to keep buyer and seller expectations stable. Ongoing inventory shortages, that continue to worsen, also push home prices higher even while homes sell more slowly."

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