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  • The Hawkeye

Housing Market Declines

Claire DiNoto


The Newtown real estate market is beginning to stabilize and even cool compared to its unpredictability a year ago. Home sellers are now decreasing their asking prices as home sales, home shopping, and requests for home tours are decreasing.

“For many of today’s buyers, the uptick in for-sale home options is taking away the sense of urgency that they felt [a year ago] when inventory was scarce. As a result of this shift, [..] competition continued to cool in August. Home shoppers are tightening their purse strings,” Chief Economist at Realtor.com Danielle Hale said..

Additionally, the ‘shift’ that Hale describes has forced sellers to lower their prices.

“The buyers are looking at lower priced homes,” Adelle Unger, a realtor at William Pitt Sotheby’s, said.

According to Rate, in Newtown on May 13 2022, the average house was $307 per square foot. Reported October 7th, prices have dropped to $243 per square foot. 22.8 percent of homes in Newtown have had a price drop within the past year, and about half (51.1 percent) of the homes in Newtown have been sold for above their listing price, which is 2.7 percent less than the percentage of homes sold above their list price last year.

"In January, prices rose at 28 times their normal monthly rate before slowing to five times average in February as interest rates began to tick up," Ben Graboske, president of Black Knight, stated.

Rising mortgage rates have a great influence on the lowering of home prices. Home sales are down about 18 percent since January 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Redfin, a residential real estate brokerage, reported that, “requests for home tours from its users [were] down 16 percent from August 2021.” These requests have only continued to decrease since and so has the average buyers’ interest in purchasing a home.

According to William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, a local realty company in town, the average number of units sold in Newtown since September 2021 has decreased by 28.3 percent.

“Although the Newtown housing market is stable and relatively healthy, it has a low inventory level [..] it’s still a sellers market but due to the inventory we’re reaching the tipping point” said Unger.

The tipping point would mark the turning of Newtown’s real estate market from a sellers market to a buyer’s market.

Since September 2021, 41.2 percent less single family homes have been listed on the market. Home sales in Newtown are down 27.8 percent from January 2022. Many feel that these are signs of the housing market cooling. The average number of days homes last on the market has also increased from 62 days to 73 days since last year.

"June growth came in 70 percent below the long-run average. [we’ve had a] sudden shift to the largest single-month decline in home prices in more than a decade" stated Graboske.

Home prices in Newtown mirror those in most other parts of the country. The rising interest rates have impacted mortgage rates, and thus home sales have been impacted.

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