Wake County housing markets are cooling. Here’s where they’re cooling the most.
Wake County home prices peaked in June at more than $493,000.
Since then, median sales prices have sunk and houses are sitting on the market longer. The cause, experts say, is soaring interest rates cooling what had been white-hot demand. When this cooling will end is anyone’s guess.
This week, the listing platform Triangle MLS released its September market snapshots, which detail shifting markets within the state’s most populous county. While all areas have seen price declines, some towns and cities have dipped more than others. Since June, for example, the sale prices of Raleigh homes have fallen 9% while they’ve only dipped 4% in the combined Fuquay-Varina and Holly Springs market.
Overall, Wake prices have decreased 5% since reaching their high in June. The combined Cary, Apex and Morrisville market has seen a 6.2% decline; the combined Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon market has slipped by nearly 8%, as has the Garner market.
John Wood, a Realtor with Re/Max United in Cary, cautioned against extrapolating too much from a three-month sample, but he did offer a hypothesis for why Raleigh prices may be receding more than in a newer community like Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina.
“The Raleigh housing stock is an older group of homes and therefore requires a buyer to look at what money they are going to have to spend to make that home their home,” Wood said. “As money got tighter, buyers don’t have as much cash flow to make the renovations.”
Wood noted that homes across the region are still selling for more than they did in September 2021, but that some sellers are reluctant to accept that the pandemic era housing boom is over.
“We are having obstacles right now getting sellers to understand that our pricing is not the same as it was six months ago,” he said.
Waiting three times longer to sell
Between August and September, the largest change in the Wake housing market was the number of days homes stayed on the market. On average in August, Wake homes lasted 15 days before closing. In September, that number rose to 22 days, a 46% jump.
Over the summer, the time houses sat on the market more than tripled in Wake Forest, Raleigh and the combined Cary, Apex and Morrisville market — with each saw homes go 22 days on average before selling in September.
“The U.S. real estate market continues to slow as we move into fall, as rising consumer prices and higher mortgage interest rates squeeze homebuyer budgets and cool activity,” said MLS Triangle director of communications Thomas Babb in a video explaining the latest data. “The cost of borrowing has reached multi-year highs on everything from credit cards to auto loans in 2022 as mortgage interest rates topped 6% for the first time since 2008, causing existing home sales to decline for the seventh consecutive month.”
Despite rising inventory and slowing sales, Wood still said the Triangle has a significant dearth of housing options to meet the needs of expanding communities.
Raleigh’s housing supply still lags considerably behind other booming cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. These cities each have more than three months of available housing stock while Wake County only has a 1.7-month supply, according to the latest MLS report.
Inventory measures how long the existing housing supply would last if no new homes went on the market.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
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