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The real estate market is starting to slow down. Are the alarm bells ringing in your head? If not, should they be? You won’t know until you know the facts. And if you want the facts, I’m going to give them to you in this Market Report for the Third Quarter, 2022.

I really am tired of hearing people claim a crash like 2008 is coming. I’ve been hearing it since 2018. I didn’t believe it then because of the data. Turns out I was right. Same for 2019, 2020, 2021, and now also 2022. Anyone who tells you the real estate market is going to crash again like 2008 is just trying to scare you and definitely not looking at the data. I’m going to do my best not to bore you with it, but in the minutes ahead I’m going to share with you the data we watch and where that data is. We are definitely seeing the first signs of the slow down that I have been predicting.

Remember when we are talking about averages across the nation, this is going to be an average of a lot of local real estate markets. Although the national data is true, it may not be reflective of your local experience. This doesn’t mean the data is flawed, it just means that somewhere some other market is trending the other direction and the data is averaging them out.

To give you a simple example let’s imagine a classroom where the average score from the last test was an 80. Now imagine the class has just 3 people in it. As the teacher hands the tests back and announces the class average score of 80, Johnny looks at his paper and thinks, “well that’s not MY experience. I got a 60. But Suzanne thinks, Hmmm, that’s about right, because I got an 80. Franklin is thinking there must be something wrong with the data modeling because he got a 100.

So your market might be contracting faster than the national average. And some other market might still be booming. And it’s likely that within individual markets the trends are different at different price points. It’s no easy task to gather this data, and disseminating it in a meaningful way is equally challenging. But I am up to the task because that’s my appointed duty for today.