I want to give you a little bit of a data-driven validation to likely what you're feeling. You're probably feeling tired, frustrated, exhausted tired of hearing about the housing market and things that are going on, but sometimes it's nice to be reassured by, "oh yeah, this isn't just me feeling this isn't just my emotions getting caught up. This is actually, there's a lot of stuff going on. That is bringing me into this place where I'm just feeling really exhausted with what's going on in the housing market world.
So there was a report put out recently were just under 50% of homes on the market are selling above the listing price. Of course, you'd be frustrated. Half of the homes that you're seeing are selling above what you're seeing them supposed to be sold for. Did that sentence make sense? It's super frustrating and taxing. The national association of realtors also put out their realtor competence index survey in April 2021, and I wanted to just touch on a couple of things.
For instance, just right off the bat, we're seeing, realtors, expectations of buyers coming to them. Over the next three months is still remaining super strong. We're also seeing crazy high buyer traffic that doesn't seem to be slowing down, and we don't see a lot of increase in sellers coming to the market either.
Also, we're seeing median days on the market being 17 days. Last year, this was around 29 days, announced 17 days. So home used to be on the market for 29, almost 30 days, a full month. And now it's just about half of that, right?
Because of the shortage of inventory. We're also seeing that 31% of buyers are first-time homebuyers who are likely all competing on these homes. And a lot of those people don't have necessarily the luxury of being able to be out of the housing market. There are a lot of people who are in it, not just because they want to move because they need to move because of maybe something happening with where they are currently living, or they need to relocate for some other logistical reason.
On top of that, you have 25% offers being cash being cash. So one fourth, one out of every four transactions closing in cash. So it's super difficult to compete.
There are five offers on average on every single listing. You likely are competing against four other people on average for a home. So it's super taxing, not only that, but then you get under contract and you can see why deals might be coming apart.
So in this index, 73% of contracts were settled on time. So they were within the contract bounds of 25% either. Didn't close on time or didn't close at all. We can see 5% of the contracts were terminated. 22% didn't close on time and if we looked okay, why were there delayed contracts? 26% of the time, a fourth of the time, it was because of appraisal issues, and for deals that were terminated, you can't see it over here, but this is 15% were terminated because of appraisal issues.
Now there are some people who are talking about potential good news, right? We're seeing pending sales dropping 10% in the last month. We also see a mortgage purchase application. So people applying for mortgages dropped 4% week over week. So this could infer two different things from this either.
That's we're maybe at the height of the market, maybe this is the hottest it's going to get, and we'll probably see things be hot for the rest of the year, but maybe they'll start to cool down. Or what I think is probably more accurate as I think we're seeing a drop in the purchase applications and pending sales, because there just isn't a lot of inventory.
So it really can be both, it's a little bit difficult to discern and say exactly why are we at the top of the market or things slowing down simply just because there isn't a lot of inventory to be able to move on, which is also lowering the number of purchase applications. So it really does look like this market is going to continue to stay strong.
It's difficult to say is it going to have the same momentum through the end of the year, but I don't see things really turning around through the rest of the year, unfortunately, unless we see really big shifts in the market.
So I just want you to know you are not crazy for feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and maybe even defeated by this process. If you're just tired of seeing a housing market video. I totally get it. If you're tired of being in the housing world, I completely get it. And if you have the luxury of not needing to move there are a lot of people who need to move because of logistical reasons. There it's an actual need that they have to go move and find a home.
But if you're not in that space and you're just feeling completely overwhelmed and exhausted, now might be a great time to take a step back, to take a little bit of a breather if you can, and have the ability to do so because it's so easy to just continue to feel defeated and defeated by everything moving quicker than you might be able to feel like you can keep up with it.
This is a tough market, and if you're in it, I'm super sorry that you have to deal with us and go through it because it is exhausting. And you're doing everything within your power to do it, or you're following all the steps. You're doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing. You're following the plan that people are giving to you and you're trying to provide for your family and for your future moving forward. And I know that's super tough, especially with how destructive it can be emotionally to put in offers and to keep seeing that rejection happening over and over again.
If you can, take a step back right out of this wave. My hope is that it continues to that it can slow down and hopefully we can see the market may be reversed a little bit in the buyer's favor in the future, but until that happens, take a break as you need to get back to some calm if you can. So you don't feel so taxed by this housing, market.
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