What Wayne Reveals About the North Jersey Market

By William “Bill” Boswell

Bill is widely known as one of New Jersey’s most sought after real estate agents and is a sales associate of Keller Williams Prosperity Realty.

November has arrived almost in a blink. It brings an election, interest rates that remain high by the standard of the last couple of years, and the question on everyone’s mind: what, precisely, is happening with the market?

For those who have followed my updates, the answer begins where it always does, with a single town. It does not matter whether we are speaking of Bergen County, Hudson County, Sussex County, or any of the others you could name. The clearest indicator of the health of the North Jersey real estate market is the town of Wayne.

Wayne works as a bellwether for a specific reason. It is not a primary target market for buyers from outside the state, so it carries none of the false demand that distorts the towns people fixate on, such as Ridgewood or Montclair. It also holds a little of everything, commercial, residential, condos, townhomes, with a sample size large enough to be genuinely instructive.

What the inventory numbers show. In a normal, balanced market, we would expect five to six months of inventory. In Wayne, that translates to somewhere between two and three hundred homes on the market. In the worst of conditions that figure climbs sharply, and at one point during the last recession Wayne carried more than five hundred homes available at once.

Checking in as we enter November, and setting aside coming-soon listings and properties in attorney review, Wayne sits at ninety-six homes, a little below one hundred.

Stated plainly, that number tells you this remains a seller’s market, and a strong one, even if it is no longer behaving entirely as it once did.

A fast and dramatic shift. The change arrived rapidly. Earlier this year, that same conversation placed us in the thirties. Looking further back, there were points over the last two years when availability dropped into the twenties, meaning roughly twenty-some homes on the market across the entire town.

Two things are therefore happening at once. The market feels more like a buyer’s market, because inventory has been expanding, doubling and at times tripling. Underneath that, the structure of the market still sits heavily in the seller’s favor. That balance can vary at different price points, yet for the most part it holds steady across most of Northern New Jersey, where we are seeing two to three months of inventory heading into winter.

What this winter sets up. The interesting part lies in what comes next. Heading into this winter, the hope is that rates will begin to come down. As we return to a more seasonal market a few years after the pandemic, we are also unlikely to see a steady flow of new homes arrive, certainly not through the holidays and into early next year.

That combination sets us up, once again, to find ourselves in a post-holiday environment that favors sellers, particularly if interest rates ease. I recognize this is difficult to absorb, given how long the refrain has held. Even so, while we have greatly expanded the amount of inventory available, we have still not reached the balancing point of five to six months that would signal a genuine equilibrium, or the softening of prices that would accompany it.

As of now, everything is positioned to remain relatively steady. Should interest rates decrease, we may well find ourselves back in a market that sees price increases again, driven by the simple lack of inventory.

When it comes to understanding this market and giving you the information you need to make sound real estate decisions, your search ends here. I welcome the conversation. Call me at 973-224-4605, email me at northjerseyluxury@gmail.com, or visit blog.theomegarealestategroup.com, and I would be glad to help you make your next move.