The U.S. housing sector is finally cooling off. For those looking to buy, there are homes in several parts of the country that are on sale right now, according to new data.
Sellers slashed home prices in June in areas that saw red-hot price appreciation earlier in the pandemic, including Reno, Nev., Austin, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, according to Realtor.com. With more homebuyers pulling back amid higher mortgage rates and recession fears, sellers are reacting to the decline in demand.
Realtor.com looked at the 200 largest metro areas in the U.S. and calculated which ones had the highest percentage of home listings with price cuts in June.
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“With buyers pulling back, homes linger for a longer time on the market and more homeowners have to slash prices to get a deal done,” George Ratiu, senior economist at Realtor.com, said.
Ratiu noted that the price cuts have been the sharpest in places that attracted many eager out-of-state buyers earlier in the pandemic.
He expects more cities to join this list. “For buyers, the change points to more opportunities in the months ahead, especially the fall and winter,” he added.
The metro area with the highest percentage of price cuts in June was Reno. The median home list price was $677,500. About a third of the homes listed in Reno had their prices reduced by sellers.
Austin follows closely, with 32.4% of homes in the area having their prices reduced. The median list price for a home in Austin was $620,000.
Phoenix , Ariz. was a major hotspot earlier in the pandemic. Now, there’s a surge in homes being listed on the market. One local outlet said that there have been more homes on the market now in Phoenix than before the Great Recession. 29.5% of homes in Phoenix had prices slashed in June. The median home list price was $548,000.
“Sellers are worried. They missed the peak of the market,” Phoenix real-estate agent Kristy Ryan, who is with Re/Max Fine Properties, said. “So they’re putting their homes for sale as fast as they can, while their properties can still fetch a high price.”
“The bidding war days are gone on most homes,” Ryan added. “If the seller needs to sell, they’re slashing their prices to get a buyer in there.”
Anchorage, Alaska is fourth on the list, with 28.5% of homes in the area having their prices slashed. The median home list price was $436,000.
Boise, Idaho, another hot market like Phoenix, is also seeing a big share of homes going on sale. The decline in home prices was something John Burns Real Estate Consulting’s Rick Palacios, Jr. warned MarketWatch about last month.
No. 6 on the Realtor.com list is Ogden, Utah, where 27.4% of listings are getting a price cut. The median home list price is $580,000.
Sacramento, Calif., Colorado Springs, Colo., Evansville, Ind., and Medford, Ore., round out the bottom of the top 10 list. Aside from Evansville, where the median home list price was $246,000, the other spots all had median list prices of more than half a million dollars.
A quarter of homes in all the cities had their prices slashed, according to Realtor.com.
Write to MarketWatch reporter Aarthi Swaminathan at [email protected]
