Spotlight/housing: A housing market with few sellers

Homeowners, reluctant to give up the 3% to 4% mortgages they took out within the past decade, are deciding to stay put, rather than try to sell and be forced to take out a home loan at today’s rates near 7%

That has caused a fundamental change in a Buffalo Niagara housing market that already was hamstrung by a shortage of homes for sale: It has made the shortage even more acute.

The number of homes going up for sale has dropped for 12 of the last 13 months, according to the latest data from the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors.

Through the first six months of this year, the 6,156 homes that have been listed for sale are the fewest since at least 2017 and even lower than 2020, when the Covid-19 lockdown froze the housing market for more than a month.

As a result, fewer than 1,600 homes were listed for sale during June – 12% less than June 2022 and about half as many as were on the market in June 2018.