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San Antonio real estate market bucks nationwide trend caused by COVID-19

We're coming up on the best time to list your San Antonio house, but thanks to COVID-19, the real estate landscape looks pretty different this year. Zillow reports that 3D home tours are up 408 percent from February, and newly listed homes nationwide were down 27.1 percent from a year ago in the first week of April.
But not in Alamo City. While the rest of the U.S. is seeing a 19 percent drop in new listings since March 1, 2020, San Antonio stayed exactly the same.
New listings here are actually at an even zero percent since the beginning of March, and active listings are down only 0.7 percent since the same period. Total U.S. inventory has only grown by 2.5 percent since March 1, which likely correlates to homes sitting on the market for longer, but .
"It is clear that many would-be home sellers are adopting a wait-and-see approach as uncertainty continues to rule," says Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow. "Our understanding of U.S. economic conditions is changing weekly, if not daily, and early unemployment figures are striking, so it's understandable that some are hesitant to put their home on the market.
"It is possible that this year's busy home shopping season is pushed into winter as some opt to hang back, but activity continues from those who need to buy or sell for a job move or another major life event. What's not likely is that the bulk of potential home sellers and buyers simply throw up their hands and pull back from the market entirely."
By March 1, new listings in San Antonio were up 13 percent from the same time last year. Fast-forward just a month, and that number was down 11.8 percent. Though it doesn't sound impressive, the outlook in San Antonio is definitely brighter than what's happening nationwide where listings were up 17.3 percent on March 1 and down a significant 27.1 percent by April 5.
Elsewhere in Texas, Houston has seen a 1.9 percent increase in new listings from March to April of this year, but listings are down 8.7 percent from April 2019.
Dallas-Fort Worth's numbers are bleaker, with new listings down 18 percent in the past month, for a year-over-year decrease of 17.2 percent.
Austin is an outlier, up 12.8 percent in new listings from March 1-April 5, 2020, and still up 13.5 percent from April 2019.
The greatest slowdowns in new listings since March 1 were seen in Detroit (down 61.8 percent), Pittsburgh (down 55.5 percent), and New York (down 49.1 percent). But new listings were actually up or flat in 12 of the 35 largest U.S. metros, led by Phoenix (up 18.3 percent), Atlanta (up 15.6 percent), Sacramento (up 13.7 percent), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (up 13.7 percent).