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With half the year now in the books, Lawrence’s housing market is a bit like the stubborn bathroom scale. You eat less, you exercise more, you no longer start the day with Fruit Loops (even though I thought my doctor loved all types of fruit.)

Yet, the scale won’t budge downward.

So it is with the Lawrence housing market, which sure looks like it has been on a diet for the first six months of 2023. The headline number from the Lawrence Board of Realtors’ recent report is that Lawrence housing sales are down 22% from the first six months of 2022.

But when you look at home prices, you see that stubborn scale. Prices haven’t dropped despite the slowdown in sales.

But, prices also haven’t gone up, and we might be at the point where every day that we don’t break an elastic waistband is a victory.

The median selling price for a Lawrence home was $300,000 for the first half of the year, which is unchanged from the first-half average of 2022. That number is particularly noteworthy, given what has happened the last two years. At the six-month mark in 2022, the median selling price of Lawrence homes was up 13% from a year earlier. In 2021, the median selling price was up 16% from a year earlier.

Regardless of whether you’ve bought or sold a home during that time, you likely have felt the impact of those rising home prices. Those increases in selling prices have been the basis for an increase in the property values that local governments use when setting your property taxes. The last couple of tax seasons have produced some of the larger increases in memory.

This new data won’t do anything to change the tax bills that are due later this year. Those bills are based on home values as they were on Jan. 1. But, the moderation in selling prices might impact how the county sets property values for Jan. 1, 2024.

The next few months of selling prices likely will be crucial on that front. If prices actually started to drop, that might be particularly impactful. But why aren’t prices going down? It seems to be because demand is still relatively high, but the supply of homes to be bought is not. That’s why a 22% drop in sales hasn’t produced any type of price plunge.

The number of Lawrence homes on the market at the end of June was 128, which is just one more than was on the market at the end of June 2022. Thus far in 2023, the median number of days a home has been on the market before selling is four. That’s up from three at the same point in 2022.

Those are likely the numbers that are keeping home prices from falling. With demand like that, homeowners have little incentive to take anything less than their asking price. In other words, Lawrence wouldn’t have a 22% decline in housing prices, if it had more homes to sell.

But there are some signs the situation is changing modestly. In the monthly report, Lawrence Board of Realtors President Brian Johnson said “rising interest rates have made it more difficult for individuals to secure mortgages.”

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases have been designed to cool off the housing market. Those rate increases haven’t yet stopped, so we will see if July is the month that the needle on the scale actually starts moving downward. The preliminary data indicates July was another down month for sales. The monthly report shows contracts written in June, which normally would be booked as finalized sales in July, were down by more than 28%.

There’s certainly no guarantee that prices will begin to drop later this year. You only have to look at the Kansas City market to find an example of home prices rising even though home sales are declining. Through June, the median selling price of homes in the KC metro area is up 1.6% to $292,000. That’s despite the fact that home sales are down 17% for the year.

Of course, Lawrence should already know that is possible. Lawrence home sales for all of 2022 declined 13%, yet the median selling price of homes increased by 10% for the year.

Here’s a look at some of the statistics from Lawrence’s most recent report:

• There have been 446 home sales in Lawrence through the first six months of the year. If the 22% decline continues throughout the year, the Lawrence market will end the year with about 250 fewer homes sold than a year ago.

• The total value of home sales thus far in 2023 is $149.9 million, down from $190.8 million at this point a year ago.

• At the end of June, the number of properties on the market with an asking price less than $200,000 was 21, with several of those being random pieces of property that aren’t actual homes.