Four-Fifths of Buyers Don’t Expect Their Home Search to Improve

The National Association of Home Builders found that only one-fifth of prospective buyers believe that their home search will get easier in the coming months, and four-fifths believe it will stay the same or get harder.

A second quarter 2019 NAHB poll revealed that only 12% of adults are prospective home buyers, i.e. they are planning to buy a home in the next year. These prospective buyers were asked about their expectations for housing availability going forward. As the graph below shows, 20% expect the search for a home to become easier in the months ahead, essentially unchanged from the 21% who had the same expectation a year earlier. Sixty-seven percent expect availability to be harder or remain unchanged, also about the same as a year earlier (68%).

Except for Seniors (10%), about 20% of buyers in every generation expect the search for a home to get easier in the near future. Geographically, only 17% to 22% of buyers in each of the four Census regions expect easier homebuying conditions going forward. These findings come from NAHB’s Housing Trends Report HTR)** for the second quarter of 2019.

Another way to explore buyers’ perceptions about the inventory of housing available in their markets is to ask how they see the number of for-sale homes (that they like and can afford) changing. In the second quarter of 2019, 27% of buyers reported seeing more such homes on the market compared to three months earlier, a slight drop from the 29% reporting increases a year earlier. Meanwhile, the share of buyers who perceive fewer or the same number of homes for-sale fell slightly from 61% to 59% during this period.

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