The Philadelphia region’s housing market ended 2022 on a slow note.
December is typically a slow month. But activity in the Philadelphia metropolitan area dropped to the lowest level in eight years, mirroring months-long slowdowns in the rest of the Mid-Atlantic and nationwide, according to the multiple listing service Bright MLS.
Demand slowed as fewer buyers were able to afford homes, thanks in part to the overall rise in mortgage interest rates throughout 2022. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has been trending down since reaching a peak of more than 7% in November.
This year, buyers and sellers will start to accept a “new normal” in which interest rates are around 6%, and pent-up demand from hesitant buyers — and those distracted by the holidays — will be released, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS.
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Market information for this story was all provided by Bright MLS.
Sellers joined buyers in slowing their activity last month compared to the last couple of years.
Although the region had nearly a quarter more active home listings in December than it did a year earlier, “it’s almost entirely because people have stopped buying homes and not because people are rushing out to list their homes,” Sturtevant said.
Supply rose fastest for single-family detached homes and townhouses, according to Bright MLS. But the supply of homes for sale remained less than half of what it was three years earlier.
Roughly 3,900 new listings entered the market in the Philly metro area in December. That’s the lowest number of monthly new listings in more than two decades, according to Bright MLS.
If the rate of sales remained steady and no new homes were listed for sale, the supply of homes on the market in December would have lasted about six weeks. A balanced market is five to seven