Hey, I'm Steve Volkers broker owner of the Steve Volkers group here in the great city of Grand Rapids, Michigan and summer has started for us. Sun's coming out right now, and 61 degrees today feels like summer. But anyway, it's kind of fun to be able to enjoy what we call is bingeing summer in west Michigan, but you're not here to listen to me.
Talk about summer and all my fun activities, your here, because Kevin and I are throwing down. The monthly data, right for the last month kept throws this booklet together for free download…grab-it, snag-it. He's constantly adding new sheets. So he added the, the interest rate sheet right this month. So you can sort of see a trend since 2017 to now we're definitely higher, uh, where the, where the peak of interest.
Since 2017. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Boy, our economy is all over the place, right? People are talking about it. Question are, are we in a recession? The recession is the GDP, uh, going down for two quarters straight. We won't know that for a couple more weeks or a month, but everybody's sort of expecting that to happen, which then they'll officially put on the news that we're in a recession, which we sort of saw coming inflation has been.
You know, what else is big as an expedition I bought last year? You know what else it has? It has a big freaking gas tank that costs me five 19, the BP. They maxed me out at a hundred dollars this morning. They wouldn't let me get more gas and it did not fill my tank. So I don't know if I'm happy that I only spent a hundred or that I was told I couldn't have any more gas, but. Ultimately, I don't see that changing anytime soon, you got the Russian issue with Ukraine and gas prices are just going to continue to go up, which then buckles people down. One thing that we didn't see before when gas prices got high and I'm probably dating myself, I don't remember the last time they'd been this high, but it was out there.
You know, people bought smaller vehicles, but then also people started talking about walkability. And that hasn't been as much of a thing over the last couple of years. People want walkability, they want cool neighborhoods. They might talk about it. But I think that walkability is going to become a conversation piece again, where it's just, man, I really only, and also maybe one vehicle is starting to become a thing. Like I don't really need to be.
But anyways, market data let's get to the data. Cause that's what I'm here to put down the raw residential real estate data in grand rapids. These are our trends. They're not necessarily national trends, but, uh, you know, some of the things that are national things, interest rates are still high.
People have talked about that. They've stabilized over the last couple of weeks at five and a quarter five and a half. But the fed meets and about a week, I think we can have half everybody expecting them probably to increase there's some news out the last yesterday when I was looking at it a little bit, talking about the fact that maybe inflationary issues are starting to calm down a little bit.
So maybe they won't need to. Oh, boy, I don't know. I think they're still gonna raise them and I think we could be six maybe here and that will do another shocker, but people are active. What it has done in the real estate market. The last two weeks. Backing up. It was really quiet the last month, right? More than what we'd like. Yes. There was definitely more listings, but we saw just a little bit of a less buyers in the market grabbing those listings. They all sold. And we'll talk a little bit about those numbers. Well boy, about two weeks ago, it got hot again where we definitely had a bunch of new buyers, super active writing offers again, but they weren't writing crazy.
We were writing just good standard offers. Yes, they were above, but it wasn't the 10% plus an emotional number. It was, well, let's give you a 10%, maybe above or 8% above. But we're not going to go crazy anymore, cause we're not sure that we want to afford crazy. So we've gotten a bunch of deals done over the last couple of weeks for folks that have made offers before or new in the market.
But they're only competing with two or three offers on a house. Now there are all those little starter houses that were under priced. So an agent can claim that they got 25 offers. I think that's marketing. They just didn't list the property correctly. But, that's my opinion, that they should have listened a little high.
To get a little bit more money, but they'll get it because the market will bid it up. So, we're starting to see that slow down, which is allowing some people in the market to still grab. The other thing is we saw a pretty big influx in listings, which is kind of weird. We would say that we're pretty much at the end of the spring market. So to see a bunch of listings last week and the week before then, even over the holiday weekend is pretty slow usually, but we saw a bunch of listings hit. And what I'm seeing or hearing from our clients that are saying, Hey, Steve, we want to sell our house and whatever we're moving in with boyfriend, or we bought a condo or whatever. Life is changing. They're worried about the interest rate hike again, potentially coming in a couple of weeks. And so they're like, let's get our house on the market and get it pending and get the new buyer to be able to lock in the rate. That's currently there. 'cause what if rates go up, will our price not go up?
Will it stabilize? So we're seeing a little bit of an influx of sellers jumping into the market. I think so. I can't read this without my glasses. So Kevin, I have a mind for the glare, but I got to take them off to read the data, the data again, Kevin's got this. We can drop a link. Can we drop a link below?
Just go and grab it. It's good stuff for all your data geeks like me. So residential sales this month are still down or 9% below, ultimately, the month compared to last year. So we're definitely down. Residential sales over the last four years were the four year average. So the four year average we're 11% down.
So far year to date transactions were down. Right? We've talked about this, right? The question is that lack of inventory yesterday. But it also is starting to be that there is just not enough to sell, but people are a little weary, right? Should I rent for a little bit longer? Those kinds of things. A year-to-date volume though is up. So you're going to pay more for that house. We’re 3% up from last year, this month. So definitely higher pricing is going on. Now, one thing that we're starting to see is, I know you probably can't see these, but these graphs are starting to show this trend line down on a couple of them, and down for one to three months.
So one decline, which is really interesting would be the number of showings to pendings, right? So in the height, at the beginning of February, we were 20 shows. Last year two spring market, February, March, right? We were 25 26 showings. And what was happening was there's just a lot of, there was a ton of buyers per house, right?
So you got a lot more showings in that weekend. Now, this month, the median was 12. The average was 16.3 compared to 22, 20 22 and 26. Right. So you're seeing that go down. There'd be two reasons for that. One reason is there's just less buyers, right? So instead of trying to hunt for the specific time, you want to go between two and three on Friday, and there's only one time available cause it got listed Friday morning and it's already booked.
We're actually being able to get clients through the house over that weekend. And not as many, we're also only seeing three to five offers on those houses instead of those houses, having 10 to 15. But the other thing that's starting to trend is some listings in some buyers are not holding the offers, tell a certain date, right?
So we're starting to see where a, you get me a good offer or two good offers in that first 24 hours. I'm just going to take one of those because I have a house that I want to buy that might have a deadline on Monday. So I need to make, I need to have mine pending, or we have one that we just found off market.
We're going to snag it real quick, but we need. So we're definitely starting to see that trending a little bit, which I think is why that's down. Average percent of list price has gone down as well. So we were at the height, um, basically here in, uh, April, right? We were, we went up to 1.73 we're down to 1.69. We were 1.73. Um, so again, you're starting to see this slide off a little bit, um, on what people are willing to pay home inventory is at 17% of what it was. Days on market is down two. So, um, average for last year was six average so far for this year. And I think that's that same situation. Some people are just saying, I don't want that many people through my house.
They might've sold it with their agent with someone in the brokerage. So I've seen a little bit of that going on, where I don't really want twenty-five people through my house. So they're listing it and putting it pending immediately, which affects this number, or they're just saying, get me an offer in the first 24 hours.
And as long as it's solid, I'm going to go for it. So a new listings were up 17% compared to may, which was normal. But then, you know, the interest rate gap is happening. So new listings versus selling, there was probably the biggest gaps since that 19, where we saw again, that spike of interest rates here, which slowed that market, same kind of situation we're seeing now.
So…To wrap this up, cause I'm rambling through all these super quick and you can read them for yourself, mortgage interest rates we talked about. That's pretty much it. So my 2 cents, uh, just to finish this deal up is, uh, I think the regular American is starting to feel the crunch for sure of inflation, right.
The first couple of months or whatever we were like. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is priced higher, but I think over the next couple months, as you know, I can't go anywhere without someone complaining about gas prices. Right. And that's the most tangible Monday morning, it was $5 a gallon. I thought, oh crap, I'm too busy.
I can't grab it right now. I'll wait. And it costs me 20 cents more for the exact, same thing, less than 24 hours later. And I think that that's where the average American is going to start seeing. Oh, boy, I just can't afford these things anymore. I need to cut stuff back. And one of the biggest things that they can cut back would be their housing costs or just wanting to move.
Right. They're in a stable environment. They're at a low interest rate in their house. So to try to move up, um, or even move down just doesn't, doesn't cut it for them. So I think we're still gonna have the inventory problem, which means that pricing will continue to increase. Um, but instead, maybe this year might be the year that we don't do the 15% growth and back to seven to 9% this year, we might go up to 10% and then we might end up at the end of the year at like a six to 7% role, which would be actually healthy.
Which would create, uh, some tampering of affordability that we really need to have happen, especially if interest rates gas in the, every daily commodity that you buy is more expensive right now. So I did buy wine at Martha's and I got a couple of good deals. And I felt like I was beating inflation. I was like, man, that's not a bad bottle for $14.
I need to buy them all before they get too pricey. I didn't, I left some at Martha's for you guys, but anyways, that's me. I'm Steve. Also, we got these really fancy water bottles and I was supposed to pass a bunch of amount. I got lazy and I didn't get them all out. So I got about a dozen of these guys. They're really nice. They got our city logo and name, but they're a good brand. Right? What is it? The, our RTIC brand, which I think is just as good as the Yeti. It's really good. So, throw a comment below. We'll just what you're thinking of the economy or how it's affecting you and how it's affecting your housing decisions. Make a comment, or shoot me a message of your address. And I'll shoot you one of these until they're gone. So we'd love to get rid of these. I don't need them sitting in my garage. I'd rather them in your hands. At the beach, enjoying summer in Michigan. I'm Steve, with the Steve Volkers grou and this is our monthly data report for what month was it for?...for May.
Thanks guys. See ya.
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