Now is a great time to list a home!
Inventory levels on the market have decreased just in the last month as buyers are ramping up their search due to the New Year. Looking back at the year 200, the house inventory levels have decreased from 3,699 active listings to 1,758 in the year 2021.
As of January 5, 2023 the listings have increased to 2,500 homes due to the high demand of buyers. The average sales price in central Ohio is currently $340,000, which is $50,000 more than it was in 2000. There are still many buyers looking for homes and by using Sell for One Percent, sellers can save over $10,000 in commission fees.
State of the Market
Hey there everyone, it’s Dave Barlow and I’m back with the gang. Let’s take a quick moment to talk about the state of the market and what’s going on inventory-wise for our buyers and sellers out there. If you’re a seller, we recommend listing a home right now because there’s less inventory on the market. That means there’s less competition. After the first of the year, buyers tend to start to ramp up their search because they just flipped the calendar from 2022 to 2023, and when they flip that, you have those New Year resolutions. There’s also a sense of urgency that happens. It’s like, “We were going to buy a home last year and we didn’t, and I want to get my home bought this year.” When they flip that calendar, the same thing happens when they flip it from December to January, January to February. There’s a psyche thing that happens with these people that if they didn’t get accomplished what they wanted last month, last year, they want to do it now. So what we have seen in the previous years is that the inventory levels generally slow up in December because a lot of listing agents have a kill date on their listing contract of December 31st. So we’ll have 400 – 500 fewer listings on January 1st, than what we had on December 31st because those listings expired.
Quick Update
So I’ll just give you a quick update. Last week, we had twenty-seven hundred and sixty-four active listings. Yesterday, we had twenty-five hundred and fifty-five, so that was minus 209 listings. A lot of that is because a lot of agents use December 31st as the kill date of their listing, and then when they realize they did that, they start getting phone calls and then extend them.
Comparing Active Listings
Now the interesting thing is a year ago, on the same date, we had 1,758 active listings. We are about 800 more listings this year than we were last year. In 2021, on January 6th, we had 1,872 listings, which is about 700 fewer. If you go back to the year 2000, we had thirty-six hundred and ninety-nine active listings. So you can kind of see from 2000 to 2001, 2002, and now 2003, over the past two years, because of the demand, the interest rates being low demand of buyers, it has pulled inventory levels down to a low of last year of 1,758. Now, we’re back up to 2,500, a little less than we were three years ago but there is more inventory for buyers and a low inventory for sellers even from three years ago when we thought inventory was fairly low. It’s a good time to put your house on the market because you don’t have as much competition.
Why Sell Today?
The other thing that we have to take a look at, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but the average sales price here in Columbus is now $340,000. I would guess that in January 2000, the average sales price was probably around $275,000 – $280,000. You have $50,000 of equity that you’ve built over the past three years. You have money built into your home to sell, go purchase. With Columbus, Ohio being such a hot market, we’re ranked number five in the country, fifth hottest market in the country. A ton of buyers are still moving into the area, about 50,000 a year right now. There are buyers out there looking to buy homes, they just haven’t been able to find the right one. So if you’re thinking about selling, now’s a good time to do it. As we talked about, on average, you get to save about 3% commission overall with us. With the average sales price at 340,000, you’re saving over $10,000 in commissions when you sell with us. We like to say, “Yeah, we’re gonna be 1% is our commission”, but it’s not discounted service.
You get everything that you would expect from any realtor when you use us here at Sell for One Percent. Give us a call here at (614) 451-6616. Thanks guys!
