How To Forecast Which States Will Be The First To See A Housing Downturn

One of the best ways leading indicators for how the housing market will perform a month or two from now is to look at the number of showings that are taking place right now—and in the wake of widespread closures and quarantines those numbers are dropping ever closer to zero with each passing day.

ShowingTime, the nation’s largest online appointment center for home showings, has been tracking the impact of COVID-19 and are releasing numbers every few days to show in real time how potential homebuyers and their agents are reacting around the country, providing an insight into how things are going to look for everyone as well as giving policymakers an early heads up. If you make the general assumption that a home purchase closes roughly 60-90 days after the home showings take place, it begins to be clear which states are going to be the first to have a housing slowdown. So far, the states that have seen the biggest declines are Nevada and Florida, with New York and California also showing noticeable decreases in showings.

Here are the numbers for Nevada, which they have normalized to the first calendar week of January, using that as the baseline of zero.

These percentages are compared against a seven-day rolling average, thus when it says -23.9% for Nevada that means showings have dropped by that much compared to the average for the previous seven days. Since we’re heading into spring buying season the number of bookings would normally be increasing, as the blue line shows for bookings during the same time last year.

For Florida the trend is the same, but the decrease is only 18.5%.

Before this starts sounding like a repeat of 2008 all over again, there is some room for hope. Not only do we have more advance warning about which parts of the country are showing early signs of vulnerability, but the number of virtual and 3D tour software products that agents can use might fill the gap. As just one example, yesterday, Glenn Kelman, CEO of the online brokerage Redfin, tweeted that there had been a 24-fold increase in people requesting a video tour of a home instead of an in-person one in just one week.

Here’s a look at the ShowingTime data for the top 100 cities around the country. Even though it says an increase of 8%, that is compared to the weekly average so it isn’t a sign that things are stabilizing. It should really be increasing much more than that for the third week of March, as it did last year when it went up by 30.8%.

One segment to keep a closer eye on as a barometer is the starter home tier, especially for condos and townhouses. Buyers in this bracket are going to be much more comfortable relying on a video tour instead of seeing a house firsthand and are likely purchasing homes that they aren’t planning on staying in forever so they might forgo visiting it in person in favor of jumping on low interest rates while they can. Plus, condos and townhouses in this tier are unlikely to have a lot of special features that a buyer would want to see for themselves. It just might be the starter homes that save us this time around.

You can find your state on ShowingTime’s interactive map here.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.