By every single measure we have, home sales came in swinging this month, crushing previous record highs.

The average home sold for $628,449 in April, up 5% over last year and $15k above the prior month of March. $628,449 is a record-breaking sale price, outpacing January’s previous record of $626,468.

Home sale prices have the most fanfare, but we really need to look at inventory to tell the whole story. Both sold listings and new listings were up astronomically, though I’m sure you can probably guess why. 406 homes sold in the month of April compared to just 153 in April of 2020. The pandemic hit in March full force and the whole world stopped. This explains the outlier in home sales and also new listings, which jumped more than sixfold over the last year from 106 to 681 this year.

Real Estate Before and After The Pandemic: Demand Increases

Because the pandemic skewed our data so severely, we must look at the active inventory. This includes homes available before lockdown, so the effects of the pandemic don’t influence the data so heavily. Currently, there are about 1,515 homes for sale on the market. This is a 22% decline from last year, when 1,954 homes were for sale.

So with nearly a quarter of housing inventory gone, the demand is still surging post-pandemic for homes outside of the crowded city. 406 home sales is even higher than spring of 2019 when coronavirus was an unknown term. In April 2019, just 280 listings sold. This is a 45% increase in sales.

Also incredibly tight is the month’s inventory. It would now take only 3.73 months to sell all available homes currently listed. At the same time last year as well as the year before, month’s inventory was around 8 months. That’s a 54% decrease!

And if you need any more reason to believe we’re in a bull cycle, just look at the speed of home sales. Cumulative days on the market is also down from last year to 102 days, less than 3.5 months. Last spring, it would have taken 4 months to sell the same property.

Housing inventory has now been on a steady decline for a solid 8 months now since its peak last July of $2,446. Unless inventory rises, we can expect prices to keep rising istead. Keep an eye on interest rates in the coming months, which may be the dominant force in home buying activity.