We saw some major changes over the course of the last 30 days and some of them don't make a whole lot of sense, quite frankly, unless you dive into them.

So the first thing that we'll address is the inventory.

The inventory right now, as of May 1st, is 880 homes and, just to reiterate, those are site-built, single-family homes in our entire MLS that goes from Cortez Junction to Ash Fork.

What's significant about the fact that there's 880 homes on the market, as of May 1st, is that, generally speaking, our inventory peaks in either August or September.

If you take a look at our charts from last year, the highest inventory that we ever saw was in September. It was 830 homes.

So, as of May 1st, we have more inventory than we saw all of last year.

Now, if you're a buyer out there, that's all we've been asking for. You've been saying: "Where are the homes for sale? There's nothing for sale." Not just here locally in the Prescott Market, but on a national level.

This could be a sign of what might be coming down the pipe.

In terms of values, last month we did see an increase in values and when I first ran the numbers I thought that can't be right. What it reflected was about a 7% increase for Prescott and about a 5% increase for Prescott Valley.

When I dove into the numbers, what I found is that out of the 110 properties that sold in Prescott, 25 of those sold at $1million or more, many of which were built in the last five years. So it was just one of those weird months where there was a lot of homes that sold in that luxury market and that probably artifically drew the average cost per square foot up.

If you're a buyer right now, we get lots of questions. When's the right time?

Remember that everybody was kind of sitting on their hands early on in the year because there was this anticipation that the rates were going to be coming down early in 2024. And then that changed and the consumers realized that and now we have seen a fairly strong stream of buyers coming into the marketplace.

If you're a seller, what do I see? Well, first of all I don't predict the market. I just report what I see in the market.

What I can tell you is that if the inventory continues in this fashion and we continue to gain inventory coming onto the marketplace, one of the things that I would tell you is that, historically, from May until we peak in August or September we usually pick up an additional 200/300 homes on the marketplace.

If that happened, we could see inventory levels in excess of 1100 homes. The last time we saw that was back in 2016!

So we look at the values and it kind of paints one picture from last month. We see the rise in values in Prescott, Prescott Valley. Chino Valley did falter a little bit, by a couple of percentage points.

It looks like things are trending in the right direction, but when we look at some more of the leading indicators, which is our days on market (as of today MLS-wide it's about 90 days, Prescott is sitting at 97, Prescott Valley 68), this paints a slightly different picture.

Now things could change. Interest rates could come down. Right now, we're sitting at about 7.2% and started the month with 7.4%. If they continue to come down then a lot of this inventory could get gobbled up right away and we could be right back where we've been for the last two or three years.

But if the interest rates stay the same and the inventory continues to rise, it could be a sign of the market softening a little bit over the course of the next couple of months. Again, I'm not going to predict that's going to happen, but it could.

What we know right now is that buyers are out there, sellers are out there, the weather's great and if you have any questions specific to your home or your situation, please feel free to reach out - 928-237-4425.

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