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木蘭
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2025/4/29 上午 09:16:00
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房地產市場停滯，房主難以出售房產：“我們真的在流血”
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3 月房屋銷售速度是自 2009 年全球金融危機最嚴重時期以來最慢的
阿爾蒂·斯瓦米納坦
最後更新：2025年4月24日上午11:24（美國東部時間）
首次出版：2025年4月24日上午10:17（美國東部時間）
切特·加拉韋 (Chet Gallaway) 位於灣區的房子已經掛牌出售八個月了。
加拉韋的父親於 20 世紀 70 年代在加利福尼亞州聖卡洛斯建造了這所房子，切特一直住在那裡，直到他搬到距薩克拉門託以北兩小時車程的新房子。加拉韋的這處房產有租戶，目前售價約 300 萬美元。他並不急於出售，因為房子已經付清了錢。
But he didn’t expect it to be so difficult — or this slow. “I personally expected it to sell very quickly,” Gallaway, who has joint ownership of the home with his father, told MarketWatch.
Not getting any worthwhile bites, he dropped the price from $3.5 million to $3 million. Still he was getting what he considered to be lowball offers. With the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s economic policies, “I think people are just less willing to plunk down millions of dollars for a property,” he added.
Nearly 800 miles away, Ryan McDonough is facing a similar problem. When MarketWatch previously spoke with him, he was looking to buy a home closer to the city of Phoenix as his family expanded. In January, he made an offer on a home in Phoenix and closed on the property within three weeks.
In stark contrast to the quick timeframe for buying his new house, selling his existing house in Prescott Valley, about 90 miles outside of Phoenix, has been an expensive slog. “We’re hoping we made the right decision” in buying the Phoenix house, he told MarketWatch. “But right now having two mortgages and two utility bills, two homeowners association [fees] … we’re really bleeding.”
The two home sellers’ experiences reflect the unusually slow pace of what is typically a busy season for the real-estate industry.
Sales of existing homes fell in March to a six-month low as spooked buyers pulled out of the market in the face of uncertainty about the economy and jobs.
Existing-home sales fell broadly by 5.9% in March, from February, to a 4.02 million pace. That’s the number of homes that would be sold over an entire year if sales took place at the same rate every month as they did in March. The numbers are seasonally adjusted.
The annualized pace of sales is the slowest since September 2024, and the decline in sales was the biggest one-month drop since November 2022. The sales pace was also the slowest for the month of March since 2009, during the global financial crisis.
“I was hoping that we would begin to see some meaningful recovery [in sales] this year. So far, it’s not happening,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the NAR, said in a press call.
Home sales in March were down 2.4% versus the same month a year ago.
The pace of sales fell short of the expectations of economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. They had forecast the pace of home sales to fall to 4.13 million in March.
Home prices set a record in March
House hunters continue to be dogged by affordability challenges. The median price for an existing home in March was $403,700, the NAR said, which is an all-time high for that month. Prices increased by 2.7% nationally.
Notably, the median sales price of an existing home was almost the same as that of a newly built home. In March, the median new-home price was $403,600. This was “unusual,” the NAR’s Yun said, because the average new home is usually priced higher than the average existing home.
Home prices in March jumped the most in the Northeast, by 7.7%. The region is typically a more supply-constrained market. The median price of an existing home in the Northeast was $468,000.
Nationally, 21% of homes were sold above list price, which was unchanged from the month before. Listed homes received an average of 2.4 offers.
Higher-priced homes were still selling more briskly than more affordably priced homes. Sales of homes priced over $1 million rose 13.8% in March from a year ago, the highest among all price categories, followed by sales of homes priced between $750,000 and $1 million, which rose 8.6%.
All-cash purchases made up 26% of sales. The share of individual investors or second-home buyers was 15%.
Meanwhile, 32% of homes were sold to first-time buyers.
The struggle to sell in a slowing real-estate market
The NAR data also revealed that listed homes remained on the market longer, for 36 days on average, up from 33 days last March.
Even though contracts closed in 30 days on average, which was the same as a year ago, more sales were derailed. The NAR survey data showed that 13% of contracts had been delayed in the past three months, up from 10% a year ago.
And some homeowners who are selling are looking at even longer wait times.
Gallaway, who is a farmer and a real-estate investor, doesn’t want to keep cutting the asking price just to sell the home he and his father own. His father, who is nearly 80, lives on a vineyard and does not object to the sale. “He says, do what you want, handle everything — just let me know how it turns out,” Gallaway said.
And there is no rush, so Gallaway isn’t unduly concerned. “If I had to sell it, then of course I would just feed into the death spiral and just drop the price” until an offer comes in, he said. “We just don’t need to sell badly enough to capitulate.”
But in Arizona, McDonough doesn’t have the luxury of time. The couple listed their old home in early February, and it still hasn’t sold, which worries him. Since he completed the purchase of his new Phoenix house in January, he’s been making payments on both properties. He didn’t expect such a long wait. “We sold [a house] in 2020 and had no problem, even with COVID,” he said, but that was in Phoenix.
The financial pressure has been mounting as their Prescott Valley home sits on the market. They cut the price to $609,000 from its initial listing price of $630,000. His two mortgages add up to about $6,000 per month, and McDonough is also facing the resumption of student-loan payments. He had intended to pay off a big chunk of student-loan debt with the proceeds from the home sale.
“I’m starting to think like I might need to go in with my financial assets and borrow from 401(k)s or some other assets I have,” McDonough said, to tide the family over until their old home finds a new owner.
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