Trophy Point Realty Group | Savannah Georgia Real Estate

Market Data

We have officially entered the winter slow season, which is something that we haven’t experienced since 2019.  We’re also still dealing with the fallout of rates briefly hitting 8% in October of this year.  Tons of buyers totally dropped out of the market when that happened, and we’re just now seeing the impact of that now since transactions usually take 30 days to close.  Rates are now back down to almost 7% and many economists are predicting rates to decrease through 2024, which will be good news for the housing market.

The median sale price is down 3.5% since last month to $304,399. The number of closed transactions is down 9% to 863. It’s pretty typical for prices and closed transactions to slow down in the winter months.

The number of new listings is down 11% since last month to a total of 1,112, while months of inventory is up 12% to 3.71 months.  November of 2023 saw the most new listings of any November for the last ten years.

30 year conventional mortgages hit an average of 7.09% on December 1, down from 7.69% on November 1st and the recent high of 8.03% from October 19th.

The main take away for us is that we finally found the pain point in interest rates.  Somewhere between 7 and 8%, payments become so expensive relative to rents that home prices begin to tick down even in a market as strong as ours is.  We will keep a close eye on the market over the next 60-90 days to see how these lower rates impact the market. 

Our official position on the future of interest rates remains mostly the same as it’s been for the second half of this year – we expect rates to bounce around in the low 7’s for the next few months, and are expecting the second half of 2024 to be when rates begin slowly moving towards a long-term equilibrium around 5%.  It’s also important to remember that there are so many factors that impact interest rates that nobody can really predict where they’ll go and when with much accuracy.  We’re all just making our best educated guess.

We expect price appreciation to be relatively flat and transaction volume to continue to decrease until rates start getting down to the low 6’s and below, at which point we expect activity to really ramp up because there are a lot of people who want to buy and sell and simply cannot afford to make a move until rates get a bit lower.