The table is still showing a swing in favor of buyers. Like last week, we have 12 cities that have deteriorated for sellers over the last month and 5 that have improved. Avondale is the only city with a high percentage improvement of 10%, while Buckeye improved 6% and Glendale and Surprise managed another 4%. At the bottom of the table, Maricopa gave sellers a modest gain of 3%, but remains strongly favorable to buyers.
All the other cities moved in favor of buyers, with Tempe, Cave Creek, Scottsdale, Gilbert and Peoria the front runners in that trend.
The average change in CMI over the past month is -2.7% while last week we saw -2.9%. This continues the slow decelerating trend that started a week ago, but represents a very small change, largely thanks to demand holding slightly firmer. Supply continues to barrel higher, something it should not normally be doing in April. If it increases in April, then it is likely to increase further during the second half of the year, unless conditions change drastically. If conditions stay on their current track, sellers will have even more of a challenge in the second half of 2025 as each seller will be competing with too many other sellers who are equally anxious to attract a firm offer. Price cuts and concessions are going to hit new highs under these circumstances.
We have 7 cities that are still seller's markets, 4 that are balanced and 6 that are buyer's markets. Two cities (Chandler and Avondale) are above 120, but the other 5 seller's markets are only seller's markets by a very small margin with CMIs less than 115. Such a weak seller's market is barely different from a balanced market. In other words we have only 2 cities where seller's can feel a detectable advantage.
The overall CMI has been moving lower since the third week of January and yet sales pricing has remained strong right up to the end of the first quarter. However this overhang appears to be coming to a sudden end, as the median sales price and average price per square foot for closed listings have both plummeted in the last 2 weeks. The former is down 1.7% and the latter 2% in just 14 days. At this point in the year such a move is ominous and we fear an overall CMI under 80 means prices will have to fall further from current levels to restore balance to the market. In fact the situation feels similar to the second quarter of 2022, though then it was the iBuyers who took the worst of the punishment. iBuyers are now such a small percentage of the market that we no longer notice their influence very much.
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