July Mortgage Trends and Real Estate News
The home selling season is well upon us, which means it’s time to take a look at the recently released New Jersey Association of REALTORS statistics. The most recent information available, which is for June, shows some surprising changes in the statewide market over last year. There were 13,545 new listings added, which is a 6.6% increase over the previous year’s 12,710. There was also a 2.5% increase in the average sales price of single-family homes, which was $407,211, compared to the previous June selling price was only $396,182 on average.
There were some other changes as well, with the number of homes for sale showing a bit of a decrease with 46,522. For the same period last year, there were 49,539, which shows a 6.1% decrease. The month’s supply of homes also decreased to 8.9, which is 16% lower than the 10.6 for the previous June.
Central Jersey
In Central Jersey, things are still looking good, though there have been some considerable changes compared to the statistics for the state. There was a significant jump in the number of closed sales for the month, which increased 40.2% over the same period last year. Year-to-date also saw an increase of 17.5% over last year as well. The number of new listings also increased by 1.1% over June of last year, while the number of days on the market saw a 4.3% decrease to 66 days. The current inventory also saw a slight 0.2% decrease over the previous year, with the month’s supply dropping to 8 for a 9.1% decrease over last June. The median sales price also dipped by 4.8%, dropping from the previous June’s $455,500 to $433,500 last month. However, that is still above the median price for the state overall.
Condos and townhomes took a bit of hit over the previous month, with new listings dropping 2% compared with June of 2014. The median sale price also dropped to $247,000, which is a 9.5% decrease from the previous year. There was also a 16.3% increase in the number of homes available, taking the month’s supply up 14% to 4.9.
Mortgage Rates
Mortgage rates are still relatively low, especially considering that they were expected to rise fairly quickly. This may be due to the adjustment of first quarter numbers that occurred, which led to some rather unfavorable responses from Wall Street. However, the actual corrections, which were released to display a bit of a tightening in the economy, were only very minor blips overall. Even with the correction, there is no evidence that there is any turn for the worst expected in the market – in fact, the Federal Reserve isn’t even showing any indication that they plan to raise the interest rates over the summer as they were expected to do. The latest projections actually show that the current rates are expected to remain the same until around September.
Currently our rate is hovering around 3.875% with no points. Our lowest rates this year were around 3.375%. So rates are approximately .5% above our lowest rate of the year.