"So we're not done with the price drops, but they are slowing," said Dave Anderton, spokesman for the Salt Lake Board of Realtors. "I think we'll have several more months of price drops year over year, but we could be getting close to the bottom."
February also saw more sales activity than in January. Only 590 Salt Lake County homes sold in January, down 36% compared to 927 sales in January 2022. That marked the fewest number of homes sold in a single month since January 2011, when 571 homes were sold, according to the Salt Lake Board of Realtors.
"Mortgage interest rates continue to hinder sales," Rob Ockey, president of the Salt Lake Board of Realtors, said in a prepared statement at the time. "However, we expect the 30-year mortgage rate will trend lower in the coming months, as the spread between the 30-year mortgage and 10-year Treasury returns to its historical average . If that happens, we could see rates around 5.5%.
Granted, Utah's and the nation's home prices reached historic highs over the past several years. That, combined with the sudden jump in interest rates as the Federal Reserve has battled record levels of inflation, shocked the market and priced many out of buying.from being able to afford the state's median priced home in late 2022, according to estimates by Dejan Eskic, a senior research fellow at the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.