We are midway through the summer selling season, and there are some interesting statistics I wanna share. The first is about days on the market. We're still seeing homes sell really fast in the 0 to 500 space. It went from 64 days on the market down to 62. In the 1 million-plus space also selling pretty quickly, historically fast. Moving down a couple of days on average. The one price point that's moving up, and it's moved up a lot is the 500 to a million space. So if you're selling in that price point, you can expect it to take a little bit longer to sell. Last year it was in the 70s, the same period year over year. Now we're up to 93 days on the market for that price point. Why is that? Well, I tend to think it's because of the type of buyer that you have for the home, and they're more interest rate sensitive. So if you're a first-time home buyer, what do you care if you pay a 7% interest rate? You're just wanting to get out of paying rent and start building equity.
If you are a higher-end luxury client, you want that waterfront home or that perfect luxury home a little less interest rate sensitivity there. But at that middle price point, you're likely a single-family home buyer who lives in the area, works in the area. Maybe you already own a home that's at less than 3%. So you're less likely to move right now, which means buyers are a little bit more hesitant in that space, leading to longer days on the market. So what else are we seeing in the market?
Other than that, it looks pretty much the same as it has, except for appreciation rates. So appreciation rates are still up at a much more normal 6%. Last year we were at 12%, the year prior at 19%. So we have normalized down to a 6% rate, but it's hardly normal. If we see an interest rate correction and we go down again, I think you'd likely see that number rise because what we're seeing is still low inventory, down about 20% year over year on new listings, and still low sales. Same thing, down about 20% year over year, and that's on top of historically down years, year after year after year. So we still have low inventory, we have low unit sales, we have higher prices because there's less inventory, and there are still buyers. We see an interest rate change, we bet that it goes up.
