Despite double-digit increases in inventory and similar declines in new listings statewide, market conditions were still tight enough to send the median sale price higher.
New Hampshire ended 2022 with 13 percent fewer single-family home sales than the year before, a tally that belies the sharp downturn in home sales over the last six months.
The new statistics, released by The Warren Group, publisher of The Registry Review, show December home sales were off 30 percent compared to the prior year.
Statewide, only 12,322 homes changed hands last year, and only 842 last month, compared to 14,226 in all of 2021 and 1,205 in December of that year.
Many of December’s home sales likely went under agreement in October or November, when the average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage rose from 6.7 percent to 7.08 percent according to mortgage-buyer Freddie Mac, putting added pressure on buyers’ ability to pay and dissuading potential sellers from listing, experts said.
In a year marked by big drops in the number of home sales, driven by declining affordability, experts say, some parts of The Granite State saw only relatively small slides in home-sales totals.
In Sullivan and Strafford counties, home sales totals for 2022 were off only 2 percent and 4 percent, respectively, compared to the year before, despite being on opposite sides of the state. Hillsborough, too, saw relatively little decline: 2,950 single-family sales all year compared to 3,165 in 2021.
Other regions were hit harder. The biggest year-over-year declines were seen in Carroll County (27 percent drop to 686 sales) and Grafton County (24 percent down, to 814 sales).
The rest of the state’s counties saw declines between 14 percent and 16 percent.
Prices Rose 5 Percent
The statewide December median sale price was an even $400,000, according to The Warren Group, up only 5 percent from December 2021. The median sale price for all of 2022 was $415,000, up 11 percent from the year before.
According to the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, the average share of list price single-family sellers took home in December was 99.2 percent, down from 101.5 percent a year ago, the third straight month where that figure has been below 100 percent and the sixth straight month of declines, from a May peak of 105.2 percent.
This evident decline in seller power comes as the statewide inventory of single-family homes rose to 1,542 homes. It was the second month of 22.9 percent year-over-year increases and followed a13.8 percent rise in October 2022 after inventory held steady in September year-over-year, NHAR reported.
The run-up in inventory came despite a significant year-over-year fall-off in new listings. Only 554 homes hit the market last month, NHAR said, a 19.8 percent fall from December 2021. It marked the fifth month of double-digit year-over-year declines since July 2022, broken only by a 5.2 percent drop in new listings in October.
Amid all this, though, months of inventory in the market still fell to 1.3, NHAR said, compared to 1.6 in November and 1.8 in October and September.
