September Home Sales Post Highest Year-over-Year Gain in Nearly Three Years

While signaling the end of 2019’s peak selling season, September home sales rose 8.1% year-over-year – the largest year-over-year increase since November 2016. Home purchases increased in 47 of the report’s 54 markets, forcing already tight inventory totals to drop 6.1% year-over-year for the biggest decline in over a year.

The year-over-year increase in September 2019 sales was the largest September increase since 2013. This was accompanied by an August-to-September decline of 17.0%, which – while larger than average – was significantly less than the month-to-month drop of 24.4% in September 2018, when sales sharply declined amid an uncertain interest rate environment.

September 2019 marked the third consecutive month of year-over-year inventory decline. That reversed the strongest 9-month-stretch of year-over-year inventory growth – from October 2018 to June 2019 – in report history. Meanwhile, the August-to-September seasonal inventory decline of 1.5% was less than the August-to-September 5-year average drop of 2.3%.

September’s Median Sales Price of $254,500 was a year-over-year increase of 4.5%, which is in line with the year-over-year average gain of 4.9% for 2019’s first nine months.

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