Property data curator ATTOM released its second-quarter 2024 U.S. Home Sales Report, which showed homesellers earned a 55.8 percent profit margin on typical single-family home and condo sales.
That figure was largely unchanged, rising about one percentage point from the first quarter, but down one point from the second quarter of last year.
Nationwide investment returns barely moved and were still far behind a highwater mark hit in 2022, despite the median home price shooting up during the 2024 spring home-buying season to a new record of $365,000.
The price surge did help boost typical raw profits for sellers back over $130,000. That nearly marked a new all-time peak. But it failed to broadly boost profit margins around the country because the renewed price surge was not enough to outpace spikes recent sellers had been absorbing when they originally bought their homes.
“The second-quarter profit report offers a mixed bag of plusses and minuses that added up to an overall picture of not much change for sellers,” ATTOM CEO Rob Barber said in a release. “Prices jumped back upward, which was great news for owners. So did raw profits. Profit margins also remained historically elevated. But the bottom-line profit-margin trend didn’t move much at all because soaring prices are far from a new thing. Even greater price improvements will be needed to kick margins up over the rest of the year.”
Latest price and profit numbers reflect a period when the national median home value shot up 9 percent quarterly and 6 percent annually. Those gains came amid the usual springtime rise in demand among house hunters, combined with home-mortgage rates remaining relatively stable at just below 7 percent for a 30-year fixed loan, and historically tight supplies of homes for sale that made bargains few and far between.
Price increases, however, did not boost investment returns notably because median values had been rising about 8 percent quarterly and 7 percent annually during the time when homeowners were buying the properties they then sold during the second quarter of this year. Those similar price patterns largely cancelled each other out, ATTOM said.
Typical profit margins increased from the first to second quarter in 94 (58.8 percent) of the 160 metropolitan statistical areas around the U.S. with sufficient data to analyze. But they remained down annually in 100, or 62.5 percent, of those metros.
The full report can be viewed here.