According to Neal, people looking to purchase homes are in positions where they don’t have a choice but to move. This includes people getting a divorce, estate sales and foreclosures. This dynamic is forcing many buyers to extend their rental leases or overpay for them.
Data from Altos Research reflects what agents are seeing in Bergen County.
New listings there have taken a major dive since November. While a drop in listings is a normal part of the seasonality cycle, the pace has slowed dramatically. At the end of November, the 90-day rolling average of new listings was up 18.5% year over year. Today that growth number is only 3.8%.
The seven-day rolling average of new listings is down 66.7% — the third week in a row it’s plummeted by a huge margin. But it should be noted that weekly counts are volatile. The most recent count of new listings is just five.
Likewise, pending home sales have tanked. While the 90-day rolling average remains up 17.2% year over year, it’s a far cry from the end of November when the figure was up 29.9%. More telling in the near term is that weekly new listings are down 86.9% year over year.
Altos Research’s Market Action Index measures the balance of power between buyers and sellers. The current reading on a 90-day rolling basis is 45. The index considers any score above 30 to signal an advantage for sellers.
“We are still in a seller’s market, but what we’re not seeing is as many offers as we were before,” Keller Williams agent Laura Gill said. “If it’s a renovated, adorable little starter home in the $500,000 to $600,000 price range, we may still get 20 offers. But anything in a more typical price range of, let’s call it $900,000, you’re still getting multiple offers. But it would be more like five or six offers as opposed to 20.”
Buyers will be hard pressed to find the starter home Gill describes. Altos data shows that the median home price in Bergen County sits at $925,000. That’s good for 5.7% annualized growth on a 90-day rolling basis. While that’s a reasonable pace of growth, it’s down considerably from the start of 2024 when the county was posting price appreciation of close to 20%.
Looking ahead, it’s hard to see the situation improving anytime soon. Mortgage rates remain high, with the current 30-year conforming rate sitting near 7.1%, according to HousingWire‘s Mortgage Rates Center. The Federal Reserve has signaled that any rate cuts in 2025 may not be as large or as frequent as previously forecast, and Bergen County home shoppers don’t have a rosy view of conditions in the new year.
“There’s hope but not real optimism,” Neal said. “They’re hoping that there might be a Trump effect. They’re hoping that there might be an inflation effect or a Fed rate reduction effect. There’s hope but not real confidence.”
