Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville your favorite real estate podcast here in Greenville South Carolina I'm your host as always Stan McCune Realtor right here in Greenville and you can find all of my contact information in the show notes if you need to reach out to me for any of your real estate needs in or outside of Greenville of course I work other markets we work the entire upstate Spartanburg County Pickens County Lawrence County Anderson County and you know if you need me out in a county and Greenwood I might consider that as well so just let me know contact info in the show notes and make sure you don't miss future episodes just hit the little subscribe button if you can leave a comment or a rating or a review I'd appreciate all of those good things as well I'm about to do a short little trip out of town and so it's funny I was just talking to my wife last night saying I don't know what I'm gonna do my podcast on I actually did have inspiration this morning but then I got bailed out from a time standpoint because I'm just I'm quite busy right now whenever you're going out of town everyone's calling you about everything it's just the way it works and we ended up getting the GGR market stats and I am very excited about that because I wanted to cover that for this episode anyway so I am going to share my screen for those watching on YouTube and there is some juicy information in the market stats or the monthly indicators for this month so I'm very interested to dive into all this with you guys so we're just going to start right at the top with new listings data new listings for the first time in over a year went negative okay we had 20 five 14 new listings excuse me I'm rookie mistake here forgot to put my phone on do not disturb so let me do that we had 2,514 new listings that is a decrease of 3.6% from last July which was 2,609 new listings why is this important OK a few things right first off new listings that that is a way to assess not just the market as a whole but specifically whether it is turning into more of a buyer's market or a seller's market okay and here is here it's a it's a trend that most people don't fully understand because you would think okay the more new listings we have the more inventory we have the more of a buyer's market we have that's actually not normally the case okay normally the case someone that is selling their house is also someone that's going to be buying a new house so when new listings goes down that's actually an indicator when there are fewer new listings that is actually an indicator that there are fewer buyers as well there's going to be fewer homes on the market as well that means that the market is contracting that means that is shifting more in the buyer's favor as a whole a commonly misunderstood element that when we're looking at this data now on the flip side when there's a lot of new listings that doesn't necessarily mean that the market is shifting towards the seller okay often times quite the opposite and but you have to put everything together right if new listings is going up and demand is going up a lot then that means which frequently does happen right cause like I just said a lot of sellers are also buyers then in a situation like that you can have it to where a lot of more new listings can actually be beneficial to sellers but when there are fewer homes coming on the market that is a market contraction that is not good generally speaking for the market as a whole and that could indicate things are shifting I mean if the market contracts that shifts more towards the buyers but then they have fewer options as well by virtue of listing so there there's a lot of nuances to all of that and I don't have time to get into all those details but long story short that's one indicator one of many that we could be experiencing some sort of market contraction and perhaps that means that we're entering some sort of a shift because this is the first time in a long time that new listings data has been down year over year pending sales continued to be up year over year we've only had one month this this year where they've been down year over year it was only modest only a point six % increase year over year for pending sales for July so 1,574 pending sales versus 1,564 I mean that's basically the same right year over year and so but again what I'm interested to see cause the pending sales data can sometimes be a little bit of a lagging indicator now that we know that the new listings element is contracting I am very curious if the pending sales will start to go negative year over year for the remainder of the year close sales was up 4.5% year over year so it went up from 1,639 July of last year to 1,713 July of this year still very very strong numbers at 1,713 that that was a fairly strong July although that was a big a big drop from June right June was nearly hit 2,000 and here's the thing is that that is a even though that was still year over year a a fairly sizable increase right 4.5% that drop off month to month and I don't focus a lot on month to month data but when there's a big drop like that again not a good sign you know what's happened the past month mortgage rates have gone up okay as inflation data has been not great as the war of the Iran has continued to drag on as gas prices have stayed in their elevated state all of that that has been a concern for people and so in recent weeks we've actually seen mortgage rates year over year been higher than they were in 2025 that is going that is directly affecting the market right now the market does not like that Greenville does not like that people are really struggling for affordability right now if they have to get a mortgage and so this big drop off in July I could see it being even a bigger drop off or I shouldn't say an even bigger drop off but I could see that drop off continuing in August and I would not be shocked if we go into the negatives on closed sales as well not a very rosy outlook I'm having here but I'm just telling you guys what the what the data says and again this is gonna hit different people differently right if you're a buyer you know obviously the mortgage rates aren't great but some of this other data might be okay for you if you're a seller none of this is okay right this this is lousy if you're a seller days on market until sale up 10.4% from last year so it went up from 48 days on market until sale in July of last year to 53 not a whole lot to say there 53 days on market until sale that's right in line with pre covid norms I'm really not gonna react or overreact much to that just know if you list your home and it's still on the market you know two months later you haven't gotten under contract it's lingered longer than average okay and so you just need to be prepared for that median sales price here's one of the juicy ones we had one of the largest drops in median sales price year over year that we've had in a long time a 1.7% decrease so the July print came in at 326,000 for the median July of last year was 331 and change so dollar amount not a huge amount not a huge difference but to be negative 1.7% year over year that's substantial right we had in February a negative point three % and that was our first negative year of year that we had in quite some time but that's like pretty close to being flat this is substantial and again this is indicating that buyers are brushing up against what they can afford on a monthly basis and sours have to be prepared for this sours have to understand that you might be as a seller you're never thinking about it from the standpoint of what is the buyer's monthly cost as a seller you're thinking about well what is my home worth what's that top line number right the sales price what is my home worth and what should I look at you know based on what historically has sold in my neighborhood or in the area or maybe you're looking at what Zillow says whatever none of that stuff matters right now because things are rapidly evolving when you have mortgage rates go from earlier in the year they touched 5.99 till now they're at like 6.75 as I'm recording this and that's according to Mortgage News Daily which is an aggregator when you have that sort of shock in a very very short period of time this is what happens people you cannot look historically at what has sold and what the price points are the things have sold for because historically even as recent as just a few months ago mortgage rates were lower and so buyers are brushing up against what they can afford and when mortgage rates goes up the price comes down and vice versa and so sellers need to be aware that again this is another indicator that the market has contracted a bit now I'm not willing to say we're heading into a buyer's market right we have this discussion every month is it a buyer's market is a seller's market I don't know it's a nobody market as far as I'm concerned I don't hear buyers happy I don't hear sellers happy we would need to have major movement one way or the other for one of those two parties to be happy but this is an indicator that contraction is happening and if mortgage rates continue to go up or perhaps even if they don't move we I would not be shocked at all if we found ourselves in a buyer's market before the end of the year that would not shock me and that's not a prediction I'm just saying that that's very much in the cards it is a greater than 5% chance that that sort of thing could happen and everything hinges on mortgage rates right now so this mortgage rates go up by roughly 10% to 12% and then prices fall by 1.7% that's kind of what we're seeing here now the average sales price which is not the best metric to use for determining what's happening in the market but the average sales price went up 2.2% if you really want to know what the average is it's 409,997 up from 4 0 one a year ago I wanna say one more thing with regard to with regard to these prices okay because that people are going to latch on to that minus 1.7% the minus 1.7% again is being driven primarily by new construction and this is what I'm you guys won't be able to see this but I'm looking at infosparks which is a another form of software that we have that tells me what's happening in the market and according to infosparks new construction median is down 4.4% year over year okay now there's fewer closings new construction than resale homes and so that's why you know basically resales also were down they were down let me look again they were down point two % year over year and so everything was down for the month of July but it was primarily that minus one point seven % print was driven primarily by new construction which then has the ripple effect of affecting resale homes as well so just make sure that you understand that added context new construction is dragging down prices as a whole which is one way of framing it the other way to frame it is that they've come down in price to help be more affordable for people that can't afford what's out there the percent of list price received went down point three % to 98.2% versus 98.5% so if you sell a home you get a home on the market you can roughly expect it to sell for about 98.2% that's right in line with historical trends I don't really care too much that it if it went up or down a little bit which it did really not concerned about that you know during the during the Great Recession it went down to like 90 4 ninety three percent we're nowhere near that nowhere near that 98% and again this is where this is kind of what it what it's been is that it's like when people ask me is it a buyer's market or a seller's market well depends on what you look at if you looked at this you would say hmm that looks like a seller's market right but if you look at the median price point you're like oh that looks like a buyer's market which is it it's a it's a very complicated market right now like I said it's a nobody market and so we're still in an assessment period with regard to what all of this means and again you know in in the past when you have you know something like the Great Recession right that happened in 2007 2008 and all of the data that was affected by that the data that was affected the everything was affected in the market that was a systemic thing like that was something that was going to take years to correct took a lot of revamping of lending rules and all sorts of things in order to correct what we're experiencing right now is something very different we're experiencing inflation issues supply chain shock issues and the like gas price shock issues all because of a war and now some of the inflation is residual from Covid and whatnot we still haven't completely gotten over that but this is what's happening it's different and so if there was supposed to be if something were to happen with the war that were to bring gas prices down and then inflation were to moderate we could see all of these things turn on a dime and so that's a very important distinction right just because I'm telling you right now this is the trend this is where it's going doesn't mean that's where it's gonna end up or that doesn't mean that's where it's gonna be a month from now or two months from now and so that's why we have to track this every single month housing affordability index no surprise prices went down housing affordability index went up it's at 98 still not quite at 100 again because mortgage rates went up in in recent months if mortgage rates were to come down and prices were to kind of stay where they are we would see this at 100 which would mean the median family can afford the median priced home but currently it's slightly below 100 hopefully we'll see that pop back at or above 100 pretty soon inventory of homes for sale we are still hovering in the 60 400 range we're at 6,448 we we've basically been there for the past three months all right you go on Greenville MLS about 60 five hundred homes for sale that's the most we've had in a long time we've discussed that a lot in in previous episodes about this what I'm gonna focus on with this episode is that year over year it's only a 9.3% increase so we had been seeing 30+ percent increases year over year for a while back in 2025 and even before then it's really started to moderate April and March were 26% increases year over year then may was only an 18% increase year over year June 14% now July 9% what this is telling me and if you want to know July this year it was 64 48 as I already said last year it was 58 98 5,898 homes for sale at the end of the month of July I think what we're seeing here is that that we're kind of we're kind of reaching the ceiling on how many homes can be for sale at one time in this market right now given all the other prevailing things that are happening it seems like it's puttering out around 65 hundred and so you know what's going to happen eventually is that these numbers are going to continue to go down if the current trends continue they're going to continue to go down the year over year number to the point that eventually we won't have any increases year over year in inventory of homes for sale and so that's the that's the trend that we're seeing and that's a very consistent trend and it's been going on long enough now that I can call it a trend it's not just conjecture this is something that's happened now multiple months in a row now even though inventory is very high month supply has also kind of puttered out here it's at 4.2 months of supply that's only a an increase of point one over last year last year was 4.1 months of supply so the demand even though inventory is high the demand has kept up relative to what inventory levels were last year and so this is another one of those where it's like OK you know if this month supply of inventory we're starting to get to 4.5 4.6 I told you guys that's kind of where what I'm targeting as my number for given the current odd dynamics of the market where I think we would start to say it's a buyer's market we're not there yet right and we've been at 4.2 for several months in a row now so it's not like this is going up right we don't see a trend line of it going up we see it kind of staying flat and usually towards the end of the year it starts to go down which you can see if you know if you're looking on YouTube you see that trend so again conflicting data it's all because we're not seeing so much systemic things it coming in through this data more just the flash in the pan after effects of the war inflation and sudden shock of mortgage rates going up 0.75% in in a short period of time and all of that so very interesting very interesting times that we're in right now and it it's tough to navigate I'm gonna be honest this is a you know I was talking to an agent recently who was telling me that you know she's been in the business for like 30 years and she was just telling me she's tired of it you know it's exhausting there's so much negotiating happening I've never done so much negotiating as I'm having to do right now and that's because buyers and sellers are at each other's throats like everyone is squeezing every dime out of every transaction on both sides and it's because the market is in this weird state of flux right now and sellers you know don't have much equity because prices haven't gone up a whole lot the past few years and buyers don't have much purchasing power because mortgage rates are where they're at prices are where they're at all of that combined and so the end result is we've got this very intense market and yeah this this agent that I was talking to that's been in the market for 30 years she was just like I I wanna retire like I'm so tired I didn't think I would be at this point now I'm tired of this it's frustrating the days are long it's hard I don't feel that way I'm not ready to retire yet I'm having a blast cause I've got a lot of clients right now and I'm staying busy but there are exhausting days there are some a a lot of those sorts of things happening where you know there are intense negotiations and intense situations and people fighting over repairs and all of that you just need to be prepared for that if you're in the market to buy or to sell be prepared this is a murderer's row on both sides but I'm here to help you guys with that murderer's row and to try to keep you alive in the hunt so if you need a realtor let me know I'm here I'm in the Greenville Spartanburg Anderson whatever you want to include in their metro area my contact info is in the show notes as always please like rate review and subscribe to the show and I'll talk to you guys again next time!