All About Data: NEW LISTINGS
Welcome to the fifth installment of our series: All About Data!
Last week we discussed how sellers and their agents set a list price (click here for last week’s post); this week we’re moving on to the next section of our Heat Map – Listings. Specifically, New Listings and what we can learn from their patterns and trends.
How New Listing are Determined
New Listings are homes that have just come on the market. On our Heat Map, the number of New Listings in a given month is factored into Inventory as well as the percent of homes sold. Sometimes a listing will go under contract (also called “go pending”), be withdrawn, or be canceled and then come back on the market at a later date. According to the way RMLS calculates New Listings, as long as a property is re-listed with the same MLS number, it is not considered a New Listing. If a property has a new RMLS number it is considered a New Listing again. For a Cancelled listing, it must be off the market for 30 days to receive a new MLS number, and at that point it will be considered a New Listing again.
New Listings Trends
The number of New Listings that come on the market each month tend to follow a seasonal pattern. The busier months of March through July tend to have the most New Listings, while the fall and winter months tend to have fewer listings.
Looking back over the last 12 months we can see that – unsurprisingly – 2020 was not a typical year for New Listings. Instead of a steady rise in listings through mid-summer and a steady decline through the end of the year, New Listings started off strong, then dropped dramatically in April of 2020 before rising again from May to July. While we eventually reached the typical number of listings for July through December, we never made up for the big drop in listings from April through June. This really impacted the total number of listings for the year and set the stage for the dramatically low inventory we saw through the second half of 2020 and into 2021.
For the first two months of 2021 New Listings have been right where they typically are for that time of year. While that is promising, it also means we’re still not making up for the drop in listings from last year. There are still many more buyers in the market than sellers, so Inventory will remain low and prices will continue to increase.
