It was fairly common knowledge that it’s a seller’s market across the country in real estate, but here’s a piece of data that might shock you.
There are more licensed real estate agents than total number of houses for sale nationally.
The coronavirus pandemic is to blame for this. The influx in agents can be attributed to the fact that many driven, hard-working people were furloughed in 2020 in service industry jobs, so they decided to make a career change and enter real estate.
Couple that with record-low interest rates and the strongest housing boom in 15 years and it becomes understandable how this could happen.
With so many people working from home the past year, there’s been a significant rise in the number of people looking for larger homes to accommodate the new trend. People have also become more open to moving farther away from a downtown metro area, especially if they are only required to show up at the office one or two times per month.
Another reason for the influx of home buyers is the surge of people living in apartments who took a dip into home ownership for the first time in 2020.
All of this has led to an increase in home prices from coast-to-coast.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, 161 metro areas across the U.S. posted double-digit-percentage price increases. That was up from 115 metro areas with double-digit gains in the third quarter of 2020.
It’s an unusual year in the real estate sector of the economy. So strange in fact, that 1.45 million members were listed in the National Association of Realtors, while there were just 1.04 homes for sale across the United States, a 26% decrease from the previous year.
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