Across the USA the number of Home Sales tallied has declined to a much lower level than we had come to expect in recent years. For Vancouver WA and Clark County, our local RMLS has prepared the graph below that shows the Pending Sales by month for 2021, 2022 and January 2023:
The above data points are by-month, and include Existing Home Sales plus New Construction Home Sales. One of the challenges or, short-comings of this chart is that not all New Construction sales are listing in RMLS and thus, those non-RMLS New Home Sales aren't reflected in the above chart.
Another short-coming is that the years 2021 and 2022 were unusually high sales years, probably owing to the extremely low financing interest rates for those years.
In any event, in the above chart you can see Pending Sales starting to decline in April, and gaining speed with a rather consistent direction in June.
With the RMLS Existing Home Sales-Only data I work with, I like to "smooth" the data by average three-months worth of data to view the trend. The chart below also includes prior years starting with the year 2018:
For Existing Home Sales it is clear the market started turning strongly in April/May of 2022 and dropped below the action posted for the prior four years.
For January 2023, we see the continued lower number of existing-home sales for the start of the year. Will this be the "New Normal" or, is the market just Digesting the shock to the system caused by the rapid rise in interest rates? - We'll keep updating our reports in future months to see what trend we are in.
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