The year-over-year decline in iBuyer home purchases narrowed to 6 percent in the first quarter, when iBuyers bought 4,383 homes, according to a recent Redfin report. That was up 20.6 percent from the fourth quarter, a sign that iBuyers are jumping back in after pausing at the start of the pandemic, according to Redfin.
“Business really started ramping up in January and February. Since then, we’ve just had a constant barrage of deals,” Allister Booth, a RedfinNow acquisitions specialist in Los Angeles, said in a release. “We’re back to full speed and are buying more homes than we were last year. After we buy and renovate those homes, we know we’ll be able to sell them because there are so many more buyers in the market right now than there are homes available.”
iBuyers still make up a tiny portion of the overall housing market. They purchased just a half percent of homes that sold across the 418 metropolitan areas tracked by Redfin in the first quarter, down from a peak of 0.8 percent in the second half of 2019 but up from 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter.
iBuyers in Raleigh, N.C., purchased 2.9 percent of the homes sold in the first quarter, a larger share than any other iBuyer market. Next came Charlotte, N.C., (2.7 percent) Durham, N.C., and San Antonio, Texas, (2.6 percent), Tucson, Ariz., (2.3 percent) and Phoenix (2.2 percent.)
Nationally, the typical iBuyer-owned home found a buyer after 13 days on the market, the quickest pace since at least 2015, according to Redfin. That’s down from 33 days a year earlier and a revised 18 days in the fourth quarter. By comparison, the typical home in the overall market spent 31 days on the market (also the quickest pace on record), down from 50 days a year earlier and unchanged from the fourth quarter.