Potential home-sellers were sitting at the pool, taking in a movie, paddling on the Potomac or maybe out of town during the week leading up to the Memorial Day holiday, rather than getting their homes on the market.
That’s the case across the Washington, D.C., region, where new listings for the week ending May 28 were down 33 percent from a year before and even further behind figures from 2021 and 2019.
That’s according to the weekly market snapshot provided by Bright MLS, the regional multiple-listing service.
A total of 1,178 properties came onto the market during the week leading up to Memorial Day. And perhaps not surprisingly, the week traditionally marks a brief decline owing to the holiday before rebounding as the market moves into the summer months.
(The one exception in the past five years was in 2020, when there was no week-of-Memorial-Day slump. Because of COVID, that year’s market was working through uncharted territory.)
Those 1,178 homes coming to market during the week represent activity in the District of Columbia; Arlington and Fairfax counties and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church in Virginia; and Montgomery, Prince George’s and Frederick counties in Maryland.
The soft number of listings for the period are in line with recent activity. “New listings throughout the year have lagged 2022, keeping inventory levels low,” the Bright MLS report noted.
That lack of additional inventory is due, in part, to homeowners opting to contentedly sit on mortgages with rock-bottom interest rates that were obtained before the uptick that began in early 2022. And while the lack of inventory has been maddening to prospective purchasers, it also has helped to keep the region’s home-sales prices relatively stable.
The median listing price for all properties that came to the market across the region for the week ending May 28 was $590,000. While down from the preceding week, it was up 1.7 percent from the same period in 2022, even as the market was in something of a feeding frenzy with buyers attempting to find a home and settle on it in advance of spiking interest rates.
For information, see the Website at BrightMLS.com/MarketUpdate.
