As Home Prices Keep Climbing, Here’s What You Need to Know

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It’s anyone’s guess just how much higher home prices will go—and if they’ll ever slow down. Besides, if you could see the future, wouldn’t you rather focus your energies on predicting the winning lottery numbers?

Nationally, the median existing-home price for single-family abodes zoomed up to $255,600 in the second quarter of the year, according to the new quarterly report from the National Association of Realtors®. (Existing homes are previously lived-in residences as opposed to newly built abodes.) That was up 10.1% from the first quarter of the year and represented a 6.2% rise from the second quarter of last year.

Prices are continuing their steady climb because there simply aren’t enough homes on the market to go around. As the economy has improved, more people who held off on becoming homeowners or trading up to bigger, better abodes are getting into the market.

“Household incomes may be rising and giving consumers assurance that now is a good time to buy,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “But these severe inventory shortages will likely continue to be a drag on sales potential the second half of the year.”

The cost of buying a single-family home increased in about 87% of the metros that NAR looked at. Prices dropped in just 23 markets.

That might explain why sales of all existing homes, which include both single-family residences and condos, fell 0.9% in the second quarter. They hit 5.57 million, according to the seasonally adjusted numbers in the report.

“With new supply not even coming close to keeping pace, price appreciation remained swift in most markets,” Yun said. “An increasing share of would-be buyers are being priced out of the market and are unable to experience the wealth-building benefits of homeownership.”

Even the median prices of lower-priced condos and co-ops shot up to $239,500. That’s up nearly 9.5% from the first quarter of 2017 and represented a 5.4% rise from the second quarter of last year. Sorry, buyers.

The most expensive metros were, unsurprisingly, primarily in California. Silicon Valley’s San Jose topped the list with a median price of$1,183,400 for a single-family, existing home, according to the report.

Silicon Valley buyers are “commonly very well-to-do people in their mid-20s to mid-40s. Most typically are working in high tech,” says Realtor® Avi Urban of Keller Williams Palto Alto. “Many of them are making enormous amounts of money.”

But prices fluctuate during the year depending on the season as well as the local job market, he says.

“As long as the Silicon Valley economy is doing well, I do not expect prices to go down,” Urban says. “I expect prices to continue with more gradual, moderate appreciation.”

San Jose was followed by its neighbor to the north, San Francisco, at $950,000; Anaheim, CA, at $788,000; Honolulu, at $760,600; and San Diego, at $605,000.

Meanwhile, the cheapest metros were Youngstown, OH, at $87,000; Cumberland, MD, at $98,200; Decatur, IL, at $107,400; Binghamton, NY, at $109,000; and Elmira, NY, at $111,600.

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