Happy New Year to you. We hope you had a safe and happy holiday season.

In December we saw a couple of key changes in the market.

Not unlike last year, between December 31st and January 1st a bunch of homes came off the market, so we went from 802 to 704 site-built single family homes, which means there's a 13% decrease in available inventory on the market today.

We also saw an uptick in the number of pending sales in December compared to December 2022, accounting for a 36% increase of buyers putting homes under contract.

So what's contributing to all this?

It's probably mortgage rates, which were over 8% for a 30 year home loan a few short weeks ago. Rolling into January 1st, they were at about 6.73%. The speculation is that we are going to see rates continue to soften.

Home values had a bit of an uptick in Prescott and Prescott Valley by about 1.5%. MLS-wide, they went up by 1.3%, so those are fairly stable.

The one major change that did occur is that the average number of days a home is on the market until it sells has stretched a little bit. It is 91 days in Prescott, 51 in Prescott Valley, 67 in Chino Valley and 75 days MLS-wide.

That is a fairly marked increase than we have been seeing in the past couple of months. We will continue to monitor this for you, but there's probably some seasonality in these figures, due to the holidays.

A lot of people have been asking me what to expect in 2024. We have got some interesting scenarios playing out.

We have interest rates coming down, which everybody has been waiting for. So that's finally happening.

Historically, when interest rates come down, we often see the inverse happen to price, so we get a little upward pressure on pricing.

A lot of the experts out there, and I'm kind of inclined to agree without giving you my official prediction, are saying that there've been a lot of sellers that have been on the fence waiting to list their homes over the past couple of years and they've been waiting because interest rates were rising.

So now, as we see those interest rates falling, whereas historically that would mean a little bit of upward pressure in price, we're going to have to wait and see how this plays out.

On a national level we've been in an under-supplied market, no different than here where we are down to 704 homes on the market right now. So if sellers on a national level see those rates coming down and have been waiting to move across the country, state or wherever they are going, we are probably going to see a bit of an uptick in inventory, so that could tamp down the upward pressure on pricing.

If you have specific questions about what your home is worth, or interest rates, as well as the inventory that's available right now and the programmes we can offer to put you in the right home, please feel free to reach out at 928-237-4425.

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