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September 2021 – The MoxiWorks Home Sales Predictor delivers monthly predictions based on agents’ activity inside our suite of products
The first day of Fall isn’t until next week on the 22nd, but in many parts of the country it’s already starting to feel like the autumnal months have begun with kids going back to school (either in person or via the web), getting back to the grind ourselves, and for me personally, the start of football season.
It’s been a really strong Summer of home sales and while a bit of a seasonal slowdown is ahead, it’s not as much as you might think. 2021 continues to keep us on our toes.
For a quick review of the past few months, you can read July and August’s reports here and here.
August Home Sales
August, the month of last-minute vacations and usually less time spent staring at our screens, still resulted in almost 600K home sales across the country, which means we were within 1% of our prediction at 594K home sales. That’s a 3% decrease in home sales from July and no change year-over-year.
Now, historically speaking, the change of the season usually means we see a change in the amount of monthly home sales. On average we’ve seen a 14% decrease in home sales month over month when the calendar rolls over from August to September (2020 was of course an exception when home sales stayed the same at 595K between August and September). This year we are expecting to see only a 5% decrease in home sales month over month from the 594K home sales we saw in August this year.
September/October Prediction
Source: MoxiWorks Home Sales Predictor – SEP 2021
So as you can see, September will drop only marginally compared to previous years. We should see a 5% decrease both month over month and year over year. Looking to October we expect to see the number of home sales creep back up with a 1% increase from September with 569K home sales.
There are quite a few theories about why we don’t expect this seasonality to behave as it normally does for both September and October including the following:
- While home price appreciation isn’t expected to drastically drop anytime soon, according to Mike DelPrete’s most recent report, it is definitely going to start decelerate. NAR, also reported this week that they are starting to see housing affordability increase which means both of these impacts will start to (slowly) swing the market back more towards a buyer’s market.
- Inman is reporting homebuyer sentiment ticking back up for the first time this year since March which could be interesting for how that effects any inventory coming on the market.
- On the more somber side, Fortune reported this week, the mortgage forbearance program is ending September 30th and Zillow says, “25% of the 1.7 million borrowers still in forbearance are likely to list their home for sale.” While that isn’t a number that will solve the inventory shortage, it will add a decent amount of homes on the market for September and October.
What about the remainder of 2021?
Based on everything we have seen this year, we predict there will be 6.8 million home sales in 2021 almost equalling the all-time peak of 7 million home sales in 2005. While time will of course tell if this pace will truly continue, it appears there are many homes still to be bought and sold this year. What are you and your agents doing to take advantage?
The Home Sales Predictor is a set of prediction data that dives into the number of presentations created and the correlated number of U.S. home sales. This data is provided by MoxiWorks with insights from their MoxiPresent product.
