REALTORS® Confidence Index: December 2020 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 December 2020 survey.

Key Market Indicators

• The REALTORS® Buyer Traffic Index registered at 71 (60 in December 2019).²
• The REALTORS® Seller Traffic Index registered at 39 (43 in December 2019).²
• Properties were typically on the market for 21 days (41 days in December 2019).
• First-time buyers accounted for 31% of sales (31% in December 2019).
• Cash sales made up 19% of sales (20% in December 2019)

Market Outlook

• The REALTORS® Buyer Traffic Index: 3-Month Outlook registered at 74
• The REALTORS® Seller Traffic Index: 3-Month Outlook registered at 53
• REALTORS® expect a 2.4 increase in home sales in the next 3 months vs the same period one year ago.
• REALTORS® expect a 2.3 increase in home prices in the next 3 months vs the same period one year ago.
• REALTORS® expect a 2.3 increase in home prices in the next 12 months from December 2020.

Issues Affecting Buyers and Sellers

• From October 2020 - December 2020, 64% 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 (41%), rent abatement (23%), frequent smaller payments (22%), none at all (12%), and other options (1%).
• REALTORS® report “Low-inventory” 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 December 2020 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 5,949 respondents in the previous three surveys who provided their email addresses.
• There were 4,375 respondents to the online survey which ran from January 4-12, 2020, of which 2,203 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.”