Thin Inventory, Zero Price Cuts

This is the first one of these, so let me tell you what it is. Every weekday morning I go through the rate wires and my own listing alerts before my girls are awake. Most of what I learn never leaves my inbox. That seemed like a waste, so from here on I'm going to write down what I actually saw each week, including the parts that are inconvenient.

Part One: What rates actually did

Rates went up this week, and the reason was inflation data coming in firmer than people hoped.

The 30 year spent the week somewhere between 6.5 and 6.8 percent depending on the day and whose index you were reading. There was a small dip mid week, about three basis points, which felt encouraging for roughly a day. By Thursday the 30 year was rising for the third consecutive session. The 15 year sat near 6.0 percent.

One detail worth knowing if you are thinking about a refinance: refinance rates climbed faster than purchase rates this week. Those two numbers do not always move together, and when they separate it is usually a sign that lenders are pricing risk differently for the two. If you were quoted a refinance number two weeks ago, it is stale.

Here is the part I want you to hold onto. Both Fannie Mae and the Mortgage Bankers Association still expect the 30 year to land somewhere in the 6.3 to 6.5 percent range by the end of this year. The Federal Reserve is in hold mode and is not signaling anything dramatic. So the honest summary is that we are in a market that wobbles week to week inside a fairly narrow band, and the forecasts say that band holds.

That matters because it changes what "waiting" means. Waiting for a dramatic drop is not a strategy anyone can point to data for. Waiting for a quarter point is a coin flip. The thing you can actually control is being pre approved with your pricing locked, so that when the wobble goes your way you are ready to move rather than starting paperwork.

Part Two: The greater Philly picture

The most useful thing I can tell you about this region right now is that it is not one market. It is four or five, and they are behaving differently.

Chester County is still a seller's market, but a gently cooling one. Median prices are running around $550,000 to $560,000 and homes are going under contract in roughly 10 to 16 days. That is fast by any normal standard, but it is slower than it was, and slower is the direction that matters.

Lancaster has tipped slightly buyer friendly. Not dramatically, but enough that buyers there have room to ask for things they could not ask for a year ago.

The Main Line and the Philadelphia suburbs are the hardest to characterize, and the phrase I keep coming back to is balanced but unpredictable. Premium listings still command real attention. Ordinary ones sit longer than their owners expect. There is not one rule.

Philadelphia proper has listings up and prices holding firm at the same time, which is an unusual combination. Agents I follow are calling it a weird but workable market, and I think that is exactly right. More choice for buyers has not translated into sellers losing their nerve.

Further out, York is among the fastest growing home price markets in the state, and the Hershey and central PA corridor is steady and affordability driven with strong relocation demand. I mention those because a fair number of the agents I talk to work well outside Montgomery County, and those two markets are having a genuinely different year than we are.

Part Three: Conshohocken and the towns I watch

I track five areas closely: Conshohocken and the 19428 zip, Exton, Blue Bell, Plymouth Meeting, and the Lafayette Hill and Whitemarsh corridor.

This week was quiet, and quiet is worth reporting honestly rather than dressing up. On Thursday, across all five of those areas combined, exactly three new listings came onto the board in twenty four hours. One in Conshohocken, one in Exton, one in Blue Bell. Plymouth Meeting and Whitemarsh produced nothing at all.

There were zero price cuts across all five watch areas that day. Not a small number. None. I want to flag that specifically because in later weeks that number changes a great deal, and it is useful to know where we started.

There was one open house on the weekend calendar.

The three new listings did tell a story about range, though. They spanned from a $329,000 one bedroom condo in Blue Bell all the way up to a $975,000 new construction home in Conshohocken at roughly 2,600 square feet, with a $639,900 four bedroom in Exton in between. That is a market serving very different buyers at the same moment in the same handful of towns.

The Blue Bell condo is the one I would point a first time buyer toward. Entry priced inventory in that township is genuinely rare, and when it appears it does not tend to linger.

The takeaway

Rates drifted up on firmer inflation, inventory was thin, and nobody was cutting prices. If you are a buyer, this was not a week that handed you leverage. If you are a seller, it was a comfortable one.

Both of those things are about to change, and I'll show you the numbers when they do.