Dan Brown on Real EstateDaybreak's Real Estate Rundown for January 14 INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — The New Year brings new hopes and new headlines in the housing market. To get a view of where 2025 might take buyers and sellers, FC Tucker Realtor Dan Brown joined WISH-TV’s “Daybreak.” Before looking forward, Brown reflected on a mild surprise from December 2024. “We had a little uptick at the end of the year,” he said. “Usually December is a month that people focus on the holidays and slowing down. Of course, we had some weather issues, but the market had a nice, surprising little upswing, and prices actually rose. Inventory went down, the number of homes that we had to sell, because people sometimes pull their houses off the market, and they don’t put houses on the market until spring if they’re waiting that late in the year. But overall, it was a surprisingly healthy December.” Brown feels the holiday momentum bodes well for the season ahead, especially if interest rates stay within a fairly narrow range. “We were really riding a roller coaster with them for about a year-and-a-half, two years ago,” Brown recalls, contrasting the past with the current situation. “This year, they’ve been in the high sixes, they sometimes jump over seven, sometimes jump down. But they’ve found their medium…. That’s about normal (historically). So I think we’re finding our ground.” Brown also points out that what are considered “big” swings here would barely qualify as blips in other parts of the country. “Central Indiana is blessed to have a very stable real estate market. We don’t do the normal cyclical ups and downs like some of the coastal cities. And that brings some relief to home buyers as they adjust to this new (mortgage rate) reality and also still protects the equity position and the value, the property values of people selling.” In terms of the longstanding challenge of limited inventory, Brown sees at least limited progress coming on both the construction side and from potential sellers. “We’ve had a systemic housing shortage in this nation for the last 10 years. That’s not going to go away,” he acknowledges, then moves on to the hopeful news. “In central Indiana, where we focus, we’ve seen some relief there. The inventory, right now there’s about 5,000 homes on the market in central Indiana. And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s twice as much as we had this time two years ago. It’s about half as much as we’d like to see. Builders have been busy. New construction and new home builders have been out there really going after it in the second half of this year with building permits being up. “And as people adjust… a lot of hesitation has been, ‘Hey, I’m waiting for those rates to come down before I put my house on the market.’ Now that people are understanding that that’s not probably going to happen dramatically in the coming months or even years… They’re going to bring their house to market, and I think that’s where some of that relief is.”