Rising mortgage rates over the last several months have made homeownership an unattainable goal for a growing number of Americans, and as more prospective buyers pull back, home sales are falling at a lightning pace across the U.S., Realtor.com reports. The number of existing-home sales plummeted 36% year-over-year in November, but some metro areas are seeing more significant declines than others.
The biggest year-over-year decline at the close of 2022 was in Tucson, Ariz., where latent demand caused total sales to drop from 2,248 in November 2021 to 789 in November 2022, a -64.9% annual decrease.
Las Vegas has long been known as a boom or bust market, where the number of home sales cratered during the Great Recession.
“We’ve had ups and downs, buyer’s markets, seller’s markets,” says Bryan Kyle, a real estate agent and property manager at First Serve Realty in Las Vegas. “But in all my years of doing this, I haven’t seen a U-turn quite like this. We’re shaking the trees really hard, to try to find transactions right now.”
However, the number of homes for sale is still very low.
“Somehow, it actually shrank in January,” he says.
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