Welcome to this month’s edition! The overwhelming narrative nationally is that the housing market is finally slowing down and becoming more balanced for the first time in a decade. However, if you live in New England – you probably don’t feel that way. The key metric right now is months supply which is very different in New England than it is nationally.
Simply put, month’s supply is a metric that represents how long it would take for all of the current houses on the market to be purchased if no new houses were listed. The general rule of thumb is that 5-7 months of inventory is the sweet spot. According to Redfin, we currently have about 4 months of supply nationally and about 2.3 months supply in New Hampshire, where it has been hovering for some time.
Another helpful (and related) indicator is the number of active listings. Below I charted both national (blue) and New Hampshire’s (red) monthly active listings. There are two things to note, the number of active listings nationally have been increasing since 2022. New Hampshire’s number of active listings has been increasing as well but at a significantly slower pace and not fast enough to come close to a balanced market.
This should be your reminder when reading articles about the real estate market to make sure they are specific to your geographical area. This is always true but with today’s market, conditions are even more specific to geographical area.
As a quick business update, at the end of May we closed on two properties, a 3 unit in Milford and a 6 unit in Manchester. The renovations on the 6 unit are complete and tenants are signed to leases at market rents with the exception of one unit. 2 of the 3 units in Milford are complete and we are in queue to the planning board to get a fourth unit added.
We also closed on three more buildings in Manchester at the end of July totaling 21 residential units and one commercial unit.
As always, we’re looking for 3-50 unit properties in Southern New Hampshire. If you know if anyone looking to sell, we’d love to talk to them.