March 2023 Market Report

Want a real estate market update? Let’s go over the March real estate market update for Thurston County.

Hi, I’m Charlotte, your Thurston County real estate broker. The monthly data that I cover is for residential single family homes. The first thing we cover is the price, both media and sales price and average sales price.

So March, 2023 ended with a median sales price of $500,000, which was down 1.8% from March of 2022. And the average sales price ended at $542,081, which was down 2.5%. These numbers are year over year, which means comparing from this same time of last year, so March, 2023 to March, 2022. But let’s take a look at January and February of 2023 to see kind of which direction we’re headed.

So January, 2023, median sales price was $475,000 and February, median sales price was $487,000. February was 2.5% of an increase over January and March, 2023 was an additional 2.7% increase over February. So we’re appreciating so far this year.

Looking at average sales price, January was $507,614 and February was $522,683. So same here when we’re looking at the average sales price. February was 3% over January, and March was 3.7% over February. So you can see we’re steadily improving from January.

Let’s talk about new listings. New listings in March, 2023 were at 366, which was down 27.2% year over year. But are up 67.1% from February of 2023.

Now, this isn’t surprising. I reported in the last market update that spring had sprung already. Normally I encourage my seller clients to get ahead of the spring market, and it’s no different. This year. We have continued to see showings per listing go up month over month from December, and March was no different. The numbers showed 7.5 showings per listing compared with December’s 3.6 showings per listing. So buyers are definitely out and actively looking to purchase. So I encourage you if you have had any thoughts at all of selling, reach out and find out the information on what you could list your home for and what the expectations are for your price point. You don’t have to move forward with selling if you aren’t ready, but you do yourself a disservice if you don’t find out what you need to in order to make an informed decision. I encourage every homeowner to get a yearly professional equity assessment report on your home, just like you get your free credit report each year so you can monitor your financial status.

Pending homes for March, 2023 were 357, which was down by 17.2% from the previous March. This is an increase of 20.2% over February of 2023. So we’re seeing more homes go pending.

Homes closed generally represents the activity from 30 to 60 days prior. This is because homes are generally under contract for about 30 to 60 days, depending on contracts, loan programs, et cetera. For March, 2023, homes closed were 303. This is down 31.3% for March of 2023. This is actually improvement over February, 2023 by 46.4%, which makes sense since we saw more activity and increased pending sales in February.

Inventory. Now, the inventory number is a snapshot. It’s done usually on the last day of the month, and there were 300 homes in March of 2023, which was up 32.2% compared to March, 2022. We have a few more than we did in February.

And inventory isn’t sticking around on the market as long. We have 44 days on the market for March, 2023, which is a huge increase, 266.7% compared to 2022, where days on market was 12 days.

But it’s a large decrease over last month’s, 57 days by 22.8%.

So we are seeing homes go under contract more quickly. Hopefully we start to see it hover around the 30 to 40 day mark as it’s allowing buyers to just generally have a minute to think about things.

Let’s talk about percent of list price received. This means what price did the home go under contract at compared to what it was listed at? 100% means that the offer on the home was exactly what it was listed at. For example, a home is listed at 400,000 and the offer to purchase comes in at 400,000. When people were offering thousands of dollars over asking, the percentage would be over 100%. March was 100.1%, which was down 4.8% over March of 2022, but it was up over last month.

We’re continuing to see increased activity and some multiple offers in some areas and some price points, so this makes sense. As the activity increases and multiple offers come back into play, we will probably see this percentage increase.

Okay, month supply of inventory. This number is used to determine whether it’s a seller’s, buyers or neutral market. Seller is zero to three. Neutral is four to six. And above six is a buyers. Typically, we see continued appreciation in a seller’s market.

To find out the month’s supply of inventory, typically it’s calculated by taking a rolling average number of homes that have sold in the last 12 months, and we divide that by 12. This gives you the average number of homes that have sold per month. Then you take the current inventory number and divide it by the average number of homes that have sold per month. And this is gonna give you how many months of inventory we have. If nothing else came on the market, that’s how long it would take us to run out of homes to sell.

We currently have that number at 0.9 months. So not quite one month of inventory. This is an increase of 80% from March of 2022. In January, we were at one month. February we went down to 0.8 months of inventory. So we’re kind of just sticking around that 0.8 – 1 month of inventory. We’re still very firmly planted in a seller’s market. As I’ve mentioned in previous videos, this makes sense based on our inventory numbers and new listing numbers and the increased activity we are seeing. We will probably hover around this area for a while. We still have a shortage of housing and we will likely have that for years to come. This is based on the fact that not enough housing was being built after 2008, and the millennial generation is at the age to buy. The average home buyer last year was 36 years old. Now I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on this, I think that we’re gonna struggle with this low housing for quite a while.

As I mentioned before, I think it’s important as a homeowner to know what your house is worth. Not because you wanna sell, but so you know the health of your financial status. Just as you would check your credit report with your free credit report every year, you should be doing the same with your house. So click the link below to get a professional equity assessment report on your home.

As a home buyer, the data shows that while things did slow down, they’re picking back up again and they have been for a few months, so the spring market has already started. So if you’re thinking about buying, now’s the time to get started.

What do you think about the current market? Have any questions, reach out. I’d love to help.

As always, I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much!