Median home price climbs to $320,644 as demand outpaces supply, with pending sales up 31% and new listings growing 8%.
Key housing market takeaways for 434 U.S. metro areas during the four-week period ending October 11:
- The median home sale price increased 14.9% year over year to $320,644—the highest value on record in Redfin’s data.
- The median asking price of new listings was up 14.2% from a year earlier—the highest growth rate since the four-week period ending August 30.
- Pending home sales climbed 30.7% year over year, a slight uptick from the 28.6% growth rate we saw during the four weeks ending Oct. 4, but still below the September peak.
- New listings of homes for sale were up 7.5% from a year earlier, an acceleration from 4.5% during the four weeks ending October 4, but still below the early September peak.
- Active listings (the number of homes listed for sale at any point during the period) fell 28.5% from 2019 to a new all-time low.
- 45.1% of homes that went under contract had an accepted offer within the first two weeks on the market. This metric has held relatively steady since June.
- The average sale-to-list price ratio, which measures how close homes are selling to their asking prices, rose to 99.5%—a record high and 1.3 percentage points higher than a year earlier.
- For the week ending October 11, the seasonally adjusted Redfin Homebuyer Demand Index was up 40.3% from pre-pandemic levels in January and February.
“The housing market has been red hot as a wave of opportunistic homebuyers has taken advantage of record-low mortgage rates and the flexibility to work from anywhere during the pandemic,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. “Those tailwinds aren’t going away, so we may see a new wave of buyers in the new year, as people reevaluate whether their living situations really make sense given just how much the world has changed.”
“Prices are still strong, demand is still high and bidding wars are still intense, but a lot of my buyers are starting to say that they’d rather wait until next year to purchase a home, in hopes that prices will come down and competition will taper off,” said Jasen Oda, a Redfin real estate agent in Seattle. “There’s also a lot of uncertainty due to the election. I have one buyer who wants to make an offer contingent on selling his home, but he doesn’t want to list his property during the week of the election.”
More than half (57.1%) of U.S. homebuyers and sellers plan to wait until after the election to purchase or sell a home, according to a Redfin survey of 900 people conducted in October.
