REALTORS® Confidence Index: January 2021 Highlights

The REALTORS® Confidence Index (RCI) survey gathers monthly information from REALTORS® about local real estate market conditions, characteristics of buyers and sellers, and issues affecting homeownership and real estate transactions.¹ This report presents key results about market transactions from the January 2021 survey.

Key Market Indicators

• The REALTORS® Buyer Traffic Index registered at 76 (68 in January 2020).²
• The REALTORS® Seller Traffic Index registered at 35 (47 in January 2020).²
• Properties were typically on the market for 21 days (43 days in January 2020).
• First-time buyers accounted for 33% of sales (32% in January 2020).
• Cash sales made up 19% of sales (21% in January 2020).

Market Outlook

• The REALTORS® Buyer Traffic Index: 3-Month Outlook registered at 78
• The REALTORS® Seller Traffic Index: 3-Month Outlook registered at 49
• REALTORS® expect a 3.0 increase in home sales in the next 3 months vs the same period one year ago.
• REALTORS® expect a 4.9 increase in home prices in the next 3 months vs the same period one year ago.
• REALTORS® expect a 4.1 increase in home prices in the next 12 months from January 2020.

Issues Affecting Buyers and Sellers

• From November 2020 - January 2020, 65% of contracts settled on time.
• Among rent options to assist residential tenants, the most common options were options to pay over the next coming months (42%), rent abatement (22%), frequent smaller payments (24%), none at all (12%), and other options (0%).
• REALTORS® report "low-inventory and high-demand" as the major issues affecting transactions in December 2020.

REALTOR® Concerns

About the RCI Survey

• The RCI Survey gathers information from REALTORS® about local market conditions based on their client interactions and the characteristics of their most recent sales for the month.
• The January 2021 survey was sent to 50,000 REALTORS® who were selected from NAR’s more than 1.4 million members through simple random sampling and to 6,715 respondents in the previous three surveys who provided their email addresses.
• There were 4,041 respondents to the online survey which ran from February 1-8, 2021, of which 1,809 had a client. Among those who had a client, the survey’s maximum margin of error for proportion estimates is two percent at the 95 percent confidence level. The margins of error for subgroups are larger.
• NAR weights the responses by a factor that aligns the sample distribution of responses to the distribution of NAR membership.

The REALTORS® Confidence Index is provided by NAR solely for use as a reference. Resale of any part of this data is prohibited without NAR's prior written consent. For questions on this report or to purchase the RCI series, please email: Data@realtors.org

¹ Respondents report on the characteristics of their most recent sale for the month.

² An index greater than 50 means more respondents reported conditions as "strong" compared to one year ago than "weak." An index of 50 indicates a balance of respondents who viewed conditions as "strong" or "weak."