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The number of sold single-family homes and condominiums reported sold falling by nearly 20 percent.

Numbers of new listings falling off a similar cliff.

Median sale prices reported by real estate agents rising nearly 8 percent at the same time.

And high-profile real estate economists naming some of the state’s biggest housing markets among the strongest nationally and the most likely to weather 2023’s disruptions well.

The past 12 months in Connecticut’s real estate market have been nothing if not confounding to truisms about market behavior commonly held among industry observers.

“Over my 20-year career I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen [inventory] so low,” said David P. Gallitto, a senior Realtor at New Haven brokerage Huntsman, Meade & Partners.

Historically, a downturn in home sales totals has always coincided with a run-up in the number of homes on the market and a fall in prices as buyers pull back, while sellers hold out hope of unloading their properties before prices fall further. Not this time.

According to SmartMLS, Connecticut’s statewide multiple listings service, only 38,518 homes hit the market over the course of 2022, an 18.1 percent decline from the year before.

“Inventory is living, breathing data points that reflect the life cycles of the occupants. You’re an empty nester and you’re downsizing. You’re a family that’s growing,” said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of appraisers and consultants Miller Samuel Inc.

The company analyzes housing trends in Fairfield County and dozens of other markets nationally for brokerage Douglas Elliman.

Thanks to “insatiable” demand driven by ultra-low mortgage rates, inventory didn’t have time to get created by those life-cycle events, Miller said: “It’s just been wiped clean.”

As those mortgage rates climbed, then soared upwards over the second half of the year, a key demographic – move-up buyers – stayed put, preventing inventory from recovering.

“Many of the move-up buyers are traditionally homeowners here in Connecticut that are trying to move out of their current home because their families are growing and they’ve become vested in their job and they’ve seen salary increases and feel a need to move up,” said Gallitto, the 2023 president of CT Realtors. “But the listings aren’t there for them.”

And the same ultra-low interest rates that let homeowners refinance mortgages during the pandemic are offering these sellers-who-are-also-buyers a reason to stay put, Miller said.

“You’re giving up that rate and you’re not only buying a house that’s higher priced than a year ago, all of a sudden you also need to get financing at a higher rate. It’s very sticky,” he said. “That fades over time as personal situations change, but there’s no expectation of rate cuts in the immediate future because unemployment is so unusually low.”

By December, SmartMLS data shows, the number of homes for sale statewide was down over 53 percent compared to December 2020. And new listings were off 29.2 percent compared to December 2021.

This lack of inventory has kept buyers’ options constrained, Miller said, supporting prices – up 7.9 percent year-over-year for all residential sales reported to SmartMLS in 2022.

In Fairfield County, Miller said, 41.6 percent of all transactions in the fourth quarter of 2022 saw a bidding war. That’s down from a record high of 66.2 percent, set in the second quarter, but still high.

“The pandemic brought properties’ values back to where, in my humble opinion, they should be,” Gallitto said. “Values in the state of Connecticut have come back and then some, but they’ve come back to what we lost over the last 10 years [following the Great Recession].”

Buyers have also pulled back a bit, he said, discouraged after the cutthroat environment in the 2022 spring market.

But even though the state’s November median single-family sale price had risen over 10 percent since 2020 and over 35 percent since 2019 according to The Warren Group, publisher of The Commercial Record, and even though interest rates are still around double what they were at the start of the year, Connecticut’s homes are still quite affordable, Gallitto said.

“I tell buyers that six months ago, you may have been paying that much more for a property. Now that interest rates are going up the trade-off of higher interest rates and lower sales prices – it’s basically a wash,” he said.

Indeed, the economics team at Realtor.com named both the Greater Hartford and New Haven-area markets to its list of the top 10 markets “likely to hold up best” in 2023 even as many other American markets ended 2022 seeing prices stagnating or falling and most buyers priced out. And Fairfield County’s overall market and its luxury segment – the top 10 percent of all home sales by price in Miller Samuel’s definition – continues to perform more strongly than either neighboring Westchester County in New York State or comparable suburban Long Island markets, Miller said.

The residential real estate market at the end of 2022 was decidedly slow, especially compared to the “rocketship” years of 2020 and 2021, as Miller describes them, and inventory is likely to stay suppressed thanks to interest rates that aren’t likely to drop too far. Even National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said Wednesday, in reaction to the Federal Reserve’s most recent interest-rate hike, that mortgage rates aren’t likely to dip any lower than 5.5 percent, and then only by year-end. Mortgage-buyer Freddie Mac reported last week that the average rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 6.13 percent.

But Gallitto is already seeing signs that buyers and sellers “are starting to stir” after months of hibernation as spring gets nearer. The unusually mild winter might also help kick-start activity sooner than normal, he said.

But both he and Miller cautioned that sellers and their agents can’t expect a rerun of the last two years, where they could expect a bumper crop of bids, and make buyers jump on command.

“What I’m finding is, where you may have had elevated sales price over the past few years driven by the demand on the market, you’re not seeing that demand now. You’re having realtors counseling their selling clients, listing the property fairly and not at an elevated price based on comparables in the area,” Gallitto said.

Buyers, at the same time, have to realize that there won’t be a crash in home prices – at least not locally, no matter what the national headlines say.

“So buyers need to understand there’s no big discounting in existing sales. But by the same token, sellers have to realize this is not 2021,” Miller said, “Even though prices in the aggregate are rising, they’re not rising at the rate they were rising before, and they have to be careful in not getting ahead of themselves for what the market will support. It’s not so much sage advice as common sense.”