Will 2024 Be a Better Year to Buy a Home in Maine or New Hampshire?

Homebuyers have been frustrated and getting creative over the last few years, as we have seen a real estate market that most have never seen before. Low inventory and high interest rates at the same time typically doesn't benefit buyers or sellers.

For buyers, higher interest rates have knocked them out of their price range of affordability, subsequently slowing the buyer market down.

For sellers, a lot of them want to move but don't want to double their interest rates, and so are staying put for the time being. The inventory issue also comes into play for them as well, as they need to find a new home after they sell their current home.

I'm heading into my 4th year of being a realtor, and one of the many things that I have learned is to not focus too much on market predictions. Sometimes they're on point, sometimes they are way off. For example, most experts predicted home prices to go down in 2023. According to Core Logic, the average price of a home in the US actually went up 4.5%.

How about here in Maine? According to the Maine Association of Realtors, home prices actually rose more than 13 percent, to a median sales price of $376,000.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire saw a year-over-year home price increase of 9.4%, according to NH Business Review.

At the time of this article being written, interest rates are hovering in the low 7s and are expected to continue on the downward trend. If that does actually happen, that's great news, right? Well, yes and no. Sure, it will boost the approval amount for mortgages, but it will also get more buyers back in the game. This will likely bring more bidding wars back in play causing prices to inflate even higher.

The good news is according to the National Association of Realtors, they are predicting 4.71 million existing-home sales in the US in 2024, which is up 13.5% from 4.1 million expected by the end of this year. Again, these are just predictions and not stats that you should bank on.

All of this said, if the predictions turn out to be accurate, I would expect some stabilization to return to the real estate market, at least making things a little better for both buyers and sellers. How much better is yet to be determined.