Examples: California, Texas, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona. In other states, homes still sell faster than before Covid, such as New York and Georgia (barely).

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

One way of looking at the housing market is how long a home sits on the market before it sells or before it is pulled off the market when it doesn’t sell. This measure of “median days on the market” shows a mix of two things: How quickly homes sell, and how desperate homeowners are to sell by leaving their home longer on the market before delisting it. In hot markets, homes sell quickly, and if a home doesn’t get any action quickly, it’s pulled off the market quickly.

But now, in many markets, with sales down by 25% to 30% from pre-pandemic times, and with supply high, sales take a long time, and homes that don’t sell don’t get pulled off the market quickly but are allowed to sit longer to attract some interest, before the get pulled.

So here is a sample of states where in September, it took the longest for any September in at least 10 years before a home was sold or was pulled off the market: California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona. These are also among the states where supply is high, and where prices have begun to fall, in some cities at substantial rates.

But not all states. For example in Georgia, median days on the market have risen but were back only in the pre-pandemic range.

And in New York, they were substantially lower than they had been before the pandemic. New York is one of the states where inventories are still tight, though sales are way down, and prices still rose.

Every housing market is different, and these states span the range.

In Florida, the median number of days that a home sat on the market before it was sold or delisted jumped to 87 days, by far the longest for any September in at least a decade, and the second longest in that decade overall, behind only June 2020.

It was 12 days longer than in 2019, 14 days longer than in 2018, and 13 days longer than in 2017, according to data from Realtor.com, which goes back only to 2016 (dotted red line = 2024; dotted purple line = 2019):

In Texas, the median number of days a home spent on the market jumped to 67 days, by far the longest for any September in at least a decade, 8 days longer than in 2019, 7 days longer than in 2018, and 3 days longer than in 2017:

In California, the median number of days that a home spent on the market jumped to 58 days in September, by far the highest for any September over the past decade, 7 days longer than in 2019, and 15 days longer than in 2017 and 2018:

In Washington, homes sat 57 days before selling or getting pulled, by far the highest for any September since at least 2016 – which is as far as the data from Realtor.com goes back. This was 9 days longer than in 2019, 14 days longer than in 2018 and 13 days longer than in 2917

In Oregon, homes sat 73 days on the market in September before selling or getting pulled, 16 days longer than in 2019, and 19 days longer than in 2018 and 2017.

In Colorado, homes lingered 70 days on the market before selling or getting pulled, 17 days longer than in 2019, 20 days longer than in 2018, and 13 days longer than in 2017.

In Arizona, homes sat 67 days on the market, 16 days longer than in 2018 and 2019, and 11 days longer than in 2017:

But in Georgia, median days on the market, which rose to 63 days, the third-longest for any September over the past 10 years, was still below the Septembers in 2019 (64 days) and in 2017 (67 days):

And New York is an example at the other end of the range. Days on the market rose to 64 days, up by 3 days from a year ago, but shorter than in the Septembers of 2022 (65 days), 2019 (73 days), 2018 (72 days), and 2017 (74 days). It just always takes a long time to sell a home in New York.

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WOLF STREET FEATURE: Daily Market Insights by Chris Vermeulen, Chief Investment Officer, TheTechnicalTraders.com.