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The 2024 Realtor.com Housing Forecast was released Wednesday, and despite projections of a decline in home sales and prices in the Fresno area, a local expert says the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

The average mortgage rate of 6.8% is expected to continue declining, dropping to 6.5% by the end of 2024. Home prices, which have generally increased since 2012, look to drop by 1.7%.

In addition to home sales, rents are projected to drop by 0.2% next year.

Despite the prediction of an “affordability turnaround in 2024,” Realtor.com’s market prediction, which analyzes the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, forecasts another challenging year in the Fresno real estate market, calling a 6% drop in sales combined with a 0.3% fall in prices.

Of the ten California markets on the list, Fresno was one of four markets showing negative growth in both home sales and values, joined by San Francisco-Oakland, (-0.8% sales, -5.2% price), Stockton-Lodi (-5.8% sales, -3.7% price), and San Jose-Sunnyvale (-18.5% sales, -3.1% price).

Those numbers, according to Brian Domingos, president of the Fresno Association of Realtors, may not tell the whole story.

“We’ll continue to see a decline in the number of homes that are sold just due to the lock-in effects,” he said, with sellers opting to stay locked into their lower mortgage rates. “Most people that are what they’re calling ‘locked in’ are either choosing to wait or not moving at this time.”

Domingos added that recent interest rate drops in November could not be factored into the 2024 projections simply because of the 30-60 day window that many escrows lie in. With interest rates falling less than a month ago, there has not been time for the potential growth in the market to have been factored into the predictions, he said.

“We’re expecting to finish the end of the year a little bit better than we were expecting because we saw a decline in the rates,” he said.

Nationally, the markets seeing the highest growth in sales are in California, with Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura clocking in at 18% projected growth in 2024 sales, paired with a 3.3% increase in home value. Riverside fared second highest in projected 2024 growth at 13.8%, and Bakersfield ranked third, predicting an increase of 13.4% in home 2024 sales. Both markets also predicted higher 2024 prices — Bakersfield projecting a rise of 2.3% in home value while Riverside projects a climb of 3%.

“Our 2024 housing forecast reveals the green shoots we’ve been waiting to see in the housing market and should give buyers some optimism after a grueling few years,”  said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com. “Although mortgage rates are expected to ease throughout the course of the year, the continuation of high costs will mean that existing homeowners will continue to have a high threshold for deciding to move, but we will start to see some interest.”

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Estela Anahi Jaramillo contributed to this report.