With the cyclical nature of real estate sales, we will see the gradual slowing of the market through the fall and winter months. As the final full-month of summer, August still held strong. Generally speaking, August statistics were pretty neutral, in a safe and stable sense. Any signs of major shifts in the market are not evident in the fact that August slightly outperformed July in dollars and sales, and there were only marginal changes in all three of the listings categories (new, active, expired). In fact, no metric saw a double-digit percentage change from the prior month. Total sales dollars was the closest statistic to a double-digit change with an increase of 8.5% over July.
In terms of any 12-month changes, the only double-digit change of significance is total closed sales with a decrease of 12.6%; given the 150 fewer sales than August of 2022. (We don’t consider the 12-month percentage change of months of inventory and days to sell significant, because even a 1-unit change in these metrics yields a double-digit percentage change. Not to mention, both of those market performance indicators are still historically low.)
As has been broadly true for 2023 versus 2022 so far, values are up (median sale price and price per SQFT), but pace (closed transactions) has been slightly down. In fact, only one month of 2023 has surpassed the number of sales for the same month of 2022 (May).
All in all, NWA is humming right along. For a statistic enthusiast, this was actually pretty boring month to talk about, but for the health of a real estate market, it’s a good place to be. If you have any questions about the NWA market or if any of us at Acquire Realty can do to help you on your real estate journey, please reach out!