By Nick Timiraos
View inventory and price data by market.
More homes hit the market in May but asking prices dropped, providing further evidence of a disappointing run for the spring sales season.
Data from Realtor.com show that the number of homes listed for sale increased by 3.5% in May, the largest monthly increase of the year, to around 2.34 million listings. While more sellers typically list their homes for sale in the spring, inventories were down 14.3% from one year ago, when home-buyer tax credits had temporarily boosted home prices.
The Realtor.com figures include sale listings from more than 900 multiple-listing services across the country. The exact level of supply remains unclear because the figures don’t include all of the foreclosed homes that banks and other investors may be preparing to sell. The National Association of Realtors, which reports sales and inventory of existing homes for May next week, estimated the supply of unsold homes and condominiums stood at 3.87 million in April.
On a national basis over the past 27 years, inventories typically have shown little change in May from April levels, according to Zelman Associates, a research firm.
Despite the month-over-month uptick in May, compared with one year ago, listings were down in all but 11 of 146 markets tracked by Realtor.com. Listings fell from year-ago levels by 36% in Miami, 35% in Orlando, Fla., and 26% in Phoenix. Gains were reported in New York (up 10%), Las Vegas (8%) and Philadelphia (7%).
The Realtor.com figures showed that median asking prices fell in May by 1.6% after posting two months of increases. The drop could have come from more lower-priced homes being added to the mix, or it could signal that sellers dropped prices after a soft start to the seasonally strong spring sales period. Median asking prices had increased by 6.7% in April from March and by 2.2% in March from February after falling for nine straight months.
Some of the largest declines in asking prices came in Chicago and Tampa, Fla., which were down 5.7% from April, and in Phoenix (down 5.4%). Listing prices increased in just 10 of the 146 markets, including Denver and Washington, D.C.
Sellers in many markets face competition from foreclosures and other distressed sales. Others don’t feel as if they can lower their prices below the amount they owe on their mortgage. Real-estate agents say that many buyers, meanwhile, are concerned about further price declines and have been demanding deeper discounts from sellers
The SP/Case-Shiller index showed that home prices fell in March to their lowest level since home prices first began their downward slide nearly five years ago.
A separate set of indexes published earlier this month by CoreLogic Inc. showed that home prices in April were down 7.5% from one year earlier. But when distressed sales were excluded, prices were down by 0.5%.
The median time that inventory had been listed for sale on Realtor.com was higher than year-ago levels in 111 markets, offering another gauge of the housing market’s softness. In Miami, the median sale listing had been posted for 138 days in May, while in Denver, the median sale listing was just 39 days old.