A big jump in new listings and a modest increase in closings helped drive up the number of listings available to buyers in metro Denver during the peak home-selling season, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
A year ago, buyers in metro Denver had 4,632 home and condo listings to choose from, and two years ago, only 3,204. At the end of last month, there were 6,990 active listings on the market.
Libby Levinson-Katz, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee, expects the inventory will keep climbing in May and that sellers should account for that as they determine a listing price.
“Buyers on the hunt for their next property will likely choose the one priced at fair market value, with very little work needed. This is not the time to push the price or to place a home on the market to see if you can obtain the price you hope to achieve,” she said in comments accompanying the report.
The number of active listings was up 19.5% over March, about double the usual gain seen between the two months. It is up 51.3% from April 2023 and 118% from April 2022.
More new listings, which rose 21% on the month and 25.4% on the year to 5,980, contributed to the big jump in available inventory. The gain in new listings was also about double the amount usually seen between March and April.
The pace of purchases slowed as buyers coped with higher mortgage rates. Closings rose 1.7% on the month to 3,739 in metro Denver and are down 4.8% on the year. But pending sales, a measure of future activity, rose 8.3% in April from March and are 5.5% higher than in April 2023.
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After rising for five weeks straight, rates on a 30-year mortgage reached an average of 7.22%, according to a rate survey from Freddie Mac.
“On average, more than one-third of home sales for the entire year occur between March and June. With two months left of this historically busy period, potential homebuyers will likely not see relief from rising rates anytime soon,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, in a release.
Khater suggests that buyers have become more acclimated to higher rates. One sign of that is the faster turnover in listings. New listings took a median of eight days to go under contract last month in metro Denver, compared to 11 days in March.
The median price of a single-family home sold in metro Denver was $665,000, an increase of 3.1% on the month and 3.9% on the year.
For condos and townhomes, the median sales price was $419,000, which was down $950 from March’s median price and up 2.2% from the median price a year ago of $410,000.
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