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New data from brokerage and online listings portal Redfin suggests Hartford’s housing market is staying competitive, even as for-sale listings are shrinking.
New data released by the brokerage last week showed 65.2 percent of single-family and condominium listings combined in the Hartford metro sold above list price in August, making it the fourth-most competitive housing market in the nation after Rochester, New York, Buffalo, New York and Newark, New Jersey.
Nationally, only 37.6 percent of homes sold above list price, the company reported. Rising interest rates have meant some homeowners are putting off listing, driving down supply.
“When mortgage rates were below 3%, sales and home prices soared. The market was like a game of musical chairs with buyers vying for too few homes,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. “As mortgage rates approached 6%, almost everyone left the party. Now the market is more like a middle school dance where a small number of buyers and sellers are pairing up during a slow song.”
In Hartford, 1,486 new listings hit the market last month, a 22.8 percent drop year-over-year and a 7.8 percent drop over July. Total inventory was 4,039, 27 percent down over August 2021 and 4.4 percent down over July of this year.
Fairfield County also saw a steep drop in overall inventory: a 29.7 percent drop year-over-year in August, among the largest decreases among the metro areas Redfin tracks nation-wide. New listings in the area were down 27 percent year-over-year and 18 percent month-over-month, to 1,050.
Redfin’s Fairweather cautioned that the big slow-down in sales and listings doesn’t signal a market crash coming, though.
“The bottom line is that homeowners don’t need to sell in this environment. They locked in rock-bottom mortgage rates last year and are sitting on piles of equity. The jobs market remains very strong, so there’s little risk that mortgage delinquencies or foreclosures will rise significantly. It would take a severe—not soft—recession to send homeowners into distress. We will have to wait and see if the broader economy steers toward normalcy or recession in the upcoming months,” she said in a statement.
