September in Tucson real estate is typically a month where things are slowing down in anticipation of the holiday season. We see fewer overall sales compared to May-July. That doesn’t necessarily mean that prices fall or that it becomes a buyer’s market. Let’s see what it meant for this past month.
The average sales price for a single family home in September was $446,391. This is up from the previous month by $3,878. While this is not the highest home values have ever been, historically, home prices are very high right now. Combine that with still high interest rates and what you get is a very unaffordable housing market.
Days on market remained the same as August at 37 days. This is more or less around where we were before the pandemic. The difference is that in the August before the pandemic, August, 2019, there were 3,102 single family homes for sale compared with only 2,660 last month.
This past month there were 2.6 months of inventory available. As a reminder, this means that it would take 2.6 months for all the current buyers to purchase all the current available homes for sale. Ideally for a more balanced market this number would be a little bit higher, between 4 and 6 months, but even the high prices and high interest rates don’t offset the low inventory, a problem that may be here for the long haul. We have been seeing improvements, however. In July we had 2.3 months of inventory.
What we can definitely expect to see in the next few months is fewer overall sales. Whether that’s good news for buyers or sellers is TBD. We will all be watching the interest rates and waiting to see what happens with buyer demand in the coming months. Until then, have a great October!
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