El Paso TX Real Estate Market Update | FALL 2024

El Paso TX Real Estate Market Update | FALL 2024

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Live in El Paso, Texas. My name is Alejandro Sosa. My name is John Peña, and in this video, we just want to give you a quick kind of little market real estate update post summer 2024.

So I'm going to hit you with some national information and then we're going to lay it on to Alex to talk about some of kind of what's happening locally. So you probably have heard that the Fed has cut the interest rates.

Typically, they cut an interest rate or raise it by a quarter percent. They actually last month lowered the rates half of a percentage point, which is pretty phenomenal. And they're talking about lowering another half percentage point

next month in November. And that's going to have a pretty dramatic effect on mortgage interest rates. This year, we've seen interest rates seven to eight percent. It's likely that we're going to start to see anywhere from four to six percent

next year, which is going to be pretty, pretty awesome. But let's talk a little bit about this year and what we've seen nationwide. A couple of interesting points. In September, there were 12 percent more new homes

that hit the market than a year ago, which basically means that builders have caught up. You know, COVID was a big hit to builders, supply chain issues, lumber prices, labor, all of that was a train wreck.

Now it does sound like builders have finally caught up. They're in a position where they've got more homes that are readily available. We're seeing that here, which we'll talk about a little bit nationwide.

30 percent more homes went on the market last month than a year ago. This is the highest number of active listings since April of 2020. So basically what we're seeing is, and a lot of this was probably spurred on by the Fed cuts, but now we're seeing a lot of sellers

who are probably also going to be buyers next, getting off the sidelines, putting the home up on the market, looking forward to buying a home with a more affordable interest rate. So that's pretty significant.

And then one more thing here, in 2024, it sounds like we're going to have about 4.7 million existing homes sold in the country. That is the lowest number since 1995, which is unbelievable. Basically, it really proves this point that 2024 was a slow year for real estate.

It's hard to get excited about buying a home when your interest rates 7, 8, 9 percent, especially when we were used to like 3, 4 percent. So sales are expected to increase by about 10 percent next year in 2025. Of course, that's pretty speculative, but it all does kind of square up.

2024 was a pretty slow year. Now interest rates are coming down. Inflation has come down. Employment numbers are decent.

And so it's looking like the real estate market is going to start to kind of make a resurrection, if you will, this next year. So what's going on in El Paso specifically, though, locally in the El Paso market? Well, like as you said, 2024 was pretty slow.

But right now we're starting to see, I think because of the of the rates being cut, we're starting to see a lot of movement now, not only with buyers, but also with more listings, right? Like you're mentioning a lot of people before they're like,

hey, I want to sell my house, but I need to buy a house. And I had an interest rate at 3 percent, 3.5 percent, 4 percent. So I don't want to jump into an 8 percent or something like that. So it's we're really, really seeing a change, you know, day by day.

And like you said, we're expecting hopefully next year to get better. And you can see it on the new construction as well. New construction before that was doing COVID. Like you say, there was no option to get a new construction home, nothing.

Now there's more options as well. Not there's not like 50 options to pick because the market is picking up. But you will find some some new construction builders are also doing the same things right now.

Every builder is different, right? But everybody is offering incentives and they cannot think getting ready for the influx of people that are probably, you know, going to jump. If you look at the numbers last year with this year,

median sales price for this month is two hundred sixty five thousand dollars, which is up three point one percent. And we notice when it's a regular market, three to five percent is what we usually see.

So it seems like things are starting to move, I think, in a positive direction. For sure. And that is an interesting point. We were talking about it because after COVID two thousand twenty one, two thousand twenty two, things went nuts.

Interest rates were super low and we saw home prices appreciate 15 percent year over year, both years in a row. So within two years, we saw 30 percent home price appreciation, which is unheard of.

And if you were selling your home at that time, it was great. If you're buying a home, though, it wasn't that great because then all of our appraisal values went up to reflect that huge increase. So that was an ideal.

But you're exactly right. Normal appreciation year over year is typically three to five percent. This last year, three percent. That squares totally.

What about new listings in El Paso? Well, new listings, we got a thousand and five, which is up fifteen point one percent from last year. And again, we talked about this.

I think last year it was also a little bit slow, especially at the end of the year with interest rates being so high. And we had just the fear or or just people didn't want to, you know, they want to be smart with their time and their money.

You know, they wanted to wait another year. Hopefully things change and they're changing now. So, I mean, this reflects a lot more listings now. People are, you know, more encouraged and move and moving forward

or selling their house, you know? Yeah, exactly. So I think that's a pretty concise and straightforward depiction kind of of exactly what's happening on a national level and kind of here in El Paso.

We're seeing that ourselves. We're starting to see the buyers starting to trickle in a lot more. Listings are up for us and everybody else, I would imagine. So, yeah, things are things are kind of starting to to look up.

We always say real estate's a cycle roller coaster. It's up, it's down, it's up, it's down. It was definitely kind of down this year, but we're anticipating it being up this next year.

So I think that's it. And we'll see you in the next episode.