Although temperatures have been rising, the housing market has been cooling. In today’s Insight Flash, we focus on how to use our CE Web webscrape dataset to catch the inflection points of when the downturn started and when it might reverse, looking at leading indicators of sales and changes in ASP at the state level.
CE Web captures listings on the Opendoor and Offerpad websites, with the removal of a listing usually a leading indicator of a pending sale. The ratio of listings added to listings removed is one indicator of the health of the market, with a rise since the Spring a sign that more sellers than buyers exist in the marketplace. For Opendoor, there were more listings removed than added in the first two months of the year, but in June and the first 22 days of July there were twice as many listings added as removed. For Offerpad, there were more listings added than removed in the first three months, but in June and the first 22 days of July there were over 1.5x as many listings added as removed.
Leading Sales Indicators
At the same time, the average selling price (ASP) of each home has also been trending downward. In January and February, ASP for Opendoor was up over 40% y/y, but growth has slowed to only single digits in June and the beginning of July. For Offerpad, growth in January and February was up over 35% y/y, but has slowed to half that rate in June and the beginning of July.
Average Selling Price
CE Web allows users to drill down into trends at the state level as well to better understand how regional macroeconomic factors affect the housing market. For Opendoor, the biggest slowdown in ASP growth is occurring in Texas. For Offerpad, the biggest slowdown is in Tennessee, which is even experiencing negative y/y growth in Q3 so far. Utah is the one state showing acceleration in y/y ASP growth so far in Q3, though only Opendoor has recently had sales in that state.
Average Selling Price by State
