I posted about this in the beginning of June, but I felt this data needed its own post, especially since the original post was lumped together with commercial real estate and was written so long ago. The following graphs were created using data from the Georgia Realtors Monthly Indicators Reports.

The graph above shows the number of new listings each month for the past few years. The spring months are typically peak residential real estate season. It is a very popular time to buy or sell a house, as shown in the number of newly listed homes in March, April, and May of 2018 and 2019. These months typically have the most new homes listed with December as the least popular month to buy or sell a home. However, 2020 new listings during these spring months have decreased, likely because buying and selling a home during a pandemic sounds scary. If possible, people are choosing to postpone their move. On a positive note, the new listings have been increasing since April 2020, which had only 13,809 new listings. That is significantly lower than the 18,956 new listings in April 2019.

The graph below depicts the total inventory of homes each month for the past few years.

Though not very drastic, it is still evident that there has been a decrease in the total number of homes for sale in Georgia in 2020. June 2020 has the lowest number of homes for sale at 32,752. Though June has the lowest total inventory, it also had the second highest number of new listings in 2020 at 17,269.

I’ve said this before, but residential real estate has not been affected as drastically as commercial real estate. Life events that result in the need to move are still happening, regardless of a pandemic. This is shown in the graphs above. Even though there are changes, the numbers still show that residential real estate had a quick comeback and will likely continue to survive and even thrive. With that being said, it is obvious that COVID-19 did have an impact on residential real estate because people who could postpone their move chose to do so, as evident in the new listings graph. However, the return to normal for residential real estate seems to have come much sooner than for some industries.

All data from Georgia Realtors Monthly Indicators Reports