Wisconsin Home Sales Down 10.2% in March
High interest rates and uncertainty about economy blamed.
Sold sign. Photo by Dave Reid.
Wisconsin home sales in March were down by double digits compared to the same month in 2024. And sales through three months of this year are down from last year, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Realtors Association.
The report said existing home sales in March fell by 10.2 percent compared to March 2024, and sales through three months were down 0.8 percent from last year.
The supply of homes also continues to be “well below a balanced market” and new listings have been “relatively flat” over the last year, the report said. That helped to push the median home price up to $300,500 in the first quarter of 2025, a 7.3 percent increase compared to the same period last year.
Tom Larson, president of the Wisconsin Realtors Association, said high mortgage rates make it less likely people will put their home on the market or look to buy.
Average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates are still above 6 percent. Paired with broader economic uncertainty, that hurt home sales last month, Larson said.
“People are still watching interest rates and wondering if they’re going to go down further, and that has caused, I think, some people to hesitate,” he said. “The uncertainty with respect to the stock market … has just created a little bit of economic uncertainty at this point, and people are just waiting for that to stabilize.”
Nationally, existing home sales in March were down 5.9 percent from February, marking the largest seasonally adjusted month-to-month decline since November 2022, according to NPR.
Total home sales in Wisconsin last month were up from February, but January and February are traditionally the months of the year where home sales in Wisconsin are at their lowest, according to realtors association data.
Steve Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the seasonality of Wisconsin’s housing market helped insulate the state from similar month-to-month declines.
He said the dip in home sales nationally last month coincided with a slight uptick in retail sales, which could mean consumers were stocking up on items they feared could be most impacted by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“I’m not going to rush my purchasing of a house because I think tariffs are going to hit,” Deller said. “I’m going to rush my purchasing of, say, a washer and dryer or refrigerator or a car because I think tariffs are going to cause prices to go up and I want to get them now. The housing market isn’t going to be hit by tariffs the same way.”
He said negative consumer sentiment and losses in the stock market since the start of the year have also contributed to the slump in home sales last month.
“If you have a retirement fund, you’ve seen the value of your retirement fund suddenly drop,” he said. “There’s this wealth effect. My salary hasn’t changed, but my perceived wealth has dropped, so that has an effect of people wanting to pull back.”
If the broader economy doesn’t stabilize, Deller said he expects it will continue to be a drag on the housing market.
While some other states have seen median home prices decline so far in 2025, Larson with the realtors association says Wisconsin has continued to see median home prices increase. He said the state didn’t build enough homes in the years following the housing market crash of 2008.
“We have the two biggest generations — baby boomers and millennials — looking for housing,” Larson said. “It’s this perfect storm of supply and demand, and that has been the reason why we’ve seen those fairly steady price increases over the last 10 years.”
Permitting for single-family homes has risen slightly in each of the last two years, according to data from the Wisconsin Builders Association.
In an email, Brad Boycks, executive director of the association, said he’s optimistic single-family home starts will continue to grow in 2025 despite a 6.6 percent decrease in the first quarter of the year compared to 2024.
He also said that weaker home sales don’t necessarily lead to a slowdown in construction.
“We often see an increase in new home construction when existing home sales are weaker,” Boycks said. “A lack of inventory in the existing home market can drive prospective homeowners to build new homes instead.”
Wisconsin home sales saw double-digit decrease last month compared to 2024 was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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