Just when the western Nevada County market looked to be picking up steam, home sales slid backward in July with 13.7% fewer homes sold from the previous month.
June saw 127 homes sell, easily outpacing the rest of 2023, but sales slipped to just 107 closed transactions in July. It was the second time this year the local market failed to build on trending momentum, with a painfully slow start to the year setting a pace that continues to produce the slowest sales in the past five years.
January opened the year with a mere 62 homes sold locally, nearly half the number sold that same month in 2022. By the end of the first quarter, sales were already off 36.1% year over year. And just when sales had ticked up two months in a row to close out the quarter, April sales slid back 18.3% from March.
It was a similar story to close out the second quarter. Though consistently producing the lowest monthly sales in the past five years each month, the local market had ticked back up 29.5% in May with 92 homes sold and increased another 34.7% in June with 124 sales closed.
But instead of building on that momentum, the market that was so slow out of the gate to start the new year stumbled again with a total of 107 homes sold — down 13.7% from June and 15.7% fewer than total sold in July 2022.
Perhaps August sales will also track the prior trend following those stumbles and again pick up the pace, considering there were 151 pending sales at the end of July, an increase for the fourth-straight month and most pending sales in any single month of 2023, so far.
LOW INVENTORY, HIGH PRICE
One year ago, the local inventory of homes on the market appeared to have finally recovered from the pandemic-fueled sales frenzy of 2020-2021. June and July 2022 each saw more than 450 homes for sale, the first time there had been that many homes on the market since October of 2019.
There were 356 homes for sale in July, slightly down from the prior month, but nearly half the pre-pandemic inventory norms in western Nevada County. In July 2019, there were 647 homes for sale locally.
With current interest rates climbing much higher than in recent years, when homebuyers owned rates in the 2-4% ballpark, sellers have been slow to put their homes on the market and to build local inventory through the first half of the year.
And despite the market’s slow pace of sales, the low inventory appears to be helping prop up prices.
The median sold price for a western Nevada County home was $571,600 or about 2% higher than June and also 21.4% higher than the median price of $469,500 recorded in February.
Brian Hamilton is a Realtor (DRE #02149112) for the Betsy Hamilton Real Estate Team at RE/MAX Gold (DRE #01949144) in Grass Valley. Email him at Brian@BetsyHamilton.com or visit www.BetsyHamilton.com for more information.
BY THE NUMBERS
July home sales in western Nevada County:
$571,600 — Median price (2023)
$584,000 — Median price (2022)
13 – Days on market (2023)
24 – Days on market (2022)
107 – Homes sold (2023)
127 – Homes sold (2022)
356 – Homes for sale (2023)
457 – Homes for sale (2022)