Has the Market Balanced for Sellers and Buyers?

If you have been familiar with the real estate market for the past year, you may find the title of my blog post surprising.  The inventory has been low and the demand has been high.  This has resulted in bidding wars on properties and higher than usual sales prices compared to list prices.  This all indicates a sellers market. 

To further explain this, I have been comparing  the sales prices to the list prices in Harrisonburg and Rockingham for around 5 years now.  Houses have consistently been 3% under asking price. However, this year has been different.  I ran statistics earlier in the year and houses were selling at 2% under asking price.  This was one of the indications that we were in a sellers market. 

I ran the years statistics this morning and we are back to houses selling for 3% under asking price.  While I think this is good news for buyers, I do not think that this means we have a fully balanced market.   Inventory is still low.  We are still seeing houses selling quickly and bidding wars on popular listings.  

I am curious to see what this will mean as we look towards the housing market in 2019.