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A change in the calendar has not brought a change to one of Lawrence’s most expensive trends. Lawrence home prices continue to rise in 2022, according to the first set of data for the new year.

The Lawrence Board of Realtors has released home sales data for January and February, and the numbers show the median selling price of homes thus far is up nearly 18% for 2022.

The rising price of homes coincides with a slight slowdown in the number of homes sold. Home sales are down 3.2% for the first two months of the year. But a leader with the Board of Realtors said the slowdown wasn’t because buyers were losing interest as much as it was that they simply can’t find a house to buy in the market.

“Multiple offers on a property are the norm right now,” Rob Hulse, executive vice president of the Lawrence Board of Realtors, said via email. “The buyers are in the market. We just need the houses so the market can supply every buyer.”

In a sign of the competition in the market, Lindsay Landis, president of the Lawrence Board of Realtors, said she knows of one recent sale of a house in the low $200,000 range that had 17 offers from buyers.

It is that type of bidding that is driving home prices up, and even people who aren’t looking to buy or sell a home got a stark reminder of the market recently. As we reported, homeowners earlier this month received change of value notices from the Douglas County Appraiser’s Office showing the taxable value of their homes. Most properties saw the tax value — which is based on the estimated price their home would sell for — increase by 15% or more.

Those large increases — larger than any in recent memory — are creating concerns about a big hike in property taxes that will be due near the end of the year. How much property tax bills may go up isn’t yet known because local governments like the County Commission, city commissions and school boards still must set their tax rates, which traditionally are finalized in the summer. But unless those governments significantly reduce their property tax rates — something that hasn’t happened in more than a decade — homeowners are poised to see double-digit-percentage increases in their property tax bills.

In some regards, the question is now at what point potential Lawrence buyers decide to exit the market due to rising home prices. A new wrinkle is whether rising interest rates on mortgages will accelerate that exit point.

Multiple publications on Thursday reported that the average rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages topped 4% this week for the first time since May 2019. That was up from 3.85% a week ago and 3.09% a year ago. It was up from 2.65% in January 2021, which has largely been considered an all-time low for 30-year mortgages.

Hulse was not expecting the rise to 4% to produce an immediate change in the market.

“Rates are historically low, whether at 3.5%, 4%, 4.5% …” Hulse said.

If anything, rates increasing above the 4% mark may fuel another surge by buyers who fear they are going to miss out on the period of historically low interest rates.

Were there signs of that already in February, when talk of interest rate increases became more common in the news reports? Perhaps. Something seemed to be up because the February price numbers were extraordinary.

The median selling price for a home in Lawrence increased by a whopping 48% compared to the same month a year ago. In other words, the median selling price in February 2022 was $282,500, while the median selling price in February 2021 was $190,000.

This is a good point to remember that the median selling price of homes — especially during a one-month period — is not a great way of judging how much home prices in total are going up. Part of that massive increase likely is due to different types of homes being on the market in February 2022 than in February 2021. For example, if the market this year is dominated by five-bedroom homes that are for sale, where last year it was dominated by three-bedroom homes, the median price is going to rise by a lot. That doesn’t mean a three-bedroom home this year is going to sell for 48% more than a comparable three-bedroom home sold for last year.

But still …

“It remains shocking that this type of shift in the market is occurring, where the needle for the halfway point has moved up this much,” Hulse said.

Indeed, many more months of those types of increases, and the tax notices that come out at this time next year may look even more shocking than the ones you recently opened.

Here’s a look at other statistics from the recent report:

• The median selling price for all of 2022 in Lawrence is $272,450. That’s up 17.9% from a year ago. For comparison, the median selling price in the Kansas City metro is $259,900 thus far in 2022, according to data from the Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors. Home prices in Kansas City have gone up by half as much as they have in Lawrence thus far. The median home price is up by 8.3% for the year.

• The median number of days a home sits on the market before selling is five thus far in 2022. That’s unchanged from a year ago, but is down from 28 days in 2020.

• The number of active listings on the Lawrence market stood at 79 at the end of February. That was up from 72 in February 2021, but down from 211 in 2020.