Alright, today we're going to discuss the housing market numbers for January 2022. 

The national inventory of active listings declined by 28% over last year, while the total inventory of unsold homes including pending listings declined by 17%. The inventory of active listings is down 60. 4% compared to 2020 before the onset of covid-19.

We are hurting for houses across the country. Newly listed homes are down 9% nationally compared to a year ago and 11% for the large metro's over the past year, sellers are still listing at rates of 16. 8% lower than typical 2017-2020 levels. Before the pandemic. The January national median list price for active listings was 375,000.

That's up 10% compared to last year and up 25% compared to January of 2020 in large. Metro's medium list prices grew by 6% compared to last year. On average cities are still trailing behind the rest of the country nationally. The typical home spent 61 days on the market in January.

That's down 10 days from the same time last year and down 24 days from January of 2020. So houses are still selling relatively fast but January tends to be a slow month anyway for the whole country when it comes to selling houses. Now listen real quick before we jump into the housing market numbers for Knoxville I want to offer something to you. Homeowners out there.

Listen if you're thinking of selling your home or if you're just thinking about it for a year from now, two years from now or if you just want some guidance on the best way to go about staying on top of regular maintenance, then listen you should download my DIY Pre-inspection checklist. The checklist is meant for people getting ready to sell their houses to go through the checklist and make sure their houses are in tip-top shape for the inspection.

This checklist will ensure that you will pass an inspection when your home is under contract and listen if you've ever sold a house or bought a house, you know that the inspection period is probably the most stressful event in the escrow or sales process. Any issue that arises can make or break the deal so avoid it altogether by downloading this guide right now.

You can download that guide by clicking here: DIY Inspection Checklist for Homeowners

Now when it comes to the Knoxville market this year has been very frustrating. Usually, in the first half of January, we start to see a build-up of inventory and that usually carries through building up more and more until we hit the peak season for real estate which is in the spring so far this year has not followed that pattern. So let's break down the numbers and try to make sense of all of it.

As always I'm gonna start with new listings and I like how this graph here shows the ups and downs of the sale season's going back to 2019. Check it out. The current month will be highlighted in dark blue. New listings were up 10% over December and were 2% higher than January of last year.

The shape of this chart tells us that we should expect the number of new listings entering the market to continue to increase through at least the first half of the year. It's just doing it very slowly inventory and m. S. I. The blue bar shows the actual number of properties for sales each month and the green line shows the months of supply the good news here is that there were more homes available this January than last year.

We also see that there is traditionally an uptick in the months of supply in January. This is due to more listings coming on the market at the beginning of the year. But fewer closings mostly because homes of shopping always slows down during the end of the year because of Christmas and things like that. And that effect is felt for the next 30 days. Now I want to talk about the number of properties sold in the absorption rate. Again, the blue bar shows the actual numbers, the current numbers and you can see how January is typically the lowest month in the year for closings with February not much different.

The action seems to start in March and as for the green line that shows the absorption rate, this is not something that we attract or that I tracked before but it's what it is, is an average number of sales per month divided by the total number of available properties.

This is basically uh the absorption rate right now 60%. This tells us that 60% of our available inventory sells each month for perspective. A 20% or greater absorption rate is considered a seller's market and a rate under 15% is considered a buyer's market. So we are deep into the seller's market territory as we have been for quite some time now, probably like several years, almost a decade.

Next, I want to talk about the average and median sales prices. I've been reporting on the average sales price and previous snapshots. But this chart shows both the average and the median, the median shows us a number around 300,000 where half of our sales are above that number and half of our below that number.

This January's average is up nearly 26% from last January's sales price and the list-price ratio is the next thing I want to point out, which is a very important thing for buyers to know. This tells you how much a house sells compared to what it was listed for. This chart should help you when it comes to how you want to formulate your offer. This shows the sales price again to the compared and it's compared to the original list price, for instance, it shows that in January homes sold for 99% of the asking price.

In some areas in Knoxville that is 101 to 106% of the sales price or 100 points and 100% 100. 6%. You see what I'm saying 6% over the sales price. I should have scripted that one a little bit. Okay, now I want to talk about average days on the market or the number of days it takes on average for a house to sell.

This number rises and falls based on the time of year. But this graph rather clearly shows when the pandemic began to affect the market. I'm seeing that about September of 2020 when instead of going back in the fourth quarter, the days on market continued to decline. Listen, that's it for this month's real estate market update from Knoxville and the u. S.

Economy. I hope it was informative and helpful. And as always, if you need anything for me or you need help in real estate, you have needs in east Tennessee when it comes to anything real estate related, give me a call and until that happens, I hope you have a great day and we'll see you next week.