How to say 2023 housing look for Utah? Not as good as 2024.
It’s just two weeks into 2023, and Utah real estate agents are already being told to look to 2024 for things to improve.
Hundreds of them broke into a slow nervous laugh Friday when one of the state’s top housing economists offered them advice after delivering a series of forecasts of more interest rate hikes, falling home sales and other bleach markers this year.
“Just hang in there,” Jim Wood of the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute told them as they gathered for an annual look into their crystal ball. “2024 will be better.”
Historically wild swings in housing markets that started with the COVID-19 pandemic and have since wrought havoc in tandem with the state’s long-standing housing shortage still have a few quarters to go, Wood and other economists added — at least.
Here’s some of what they say to expect:
• Utah probably won’t see a recession, though the big job gains it has been enjoying will likely slow down.
• Home prices are dropping relative to their big run-up since 2020 — and nearly a decade before that, for that matter — and they’ll probably keep ticking downward well into this year. But sustained