Posted on 05/25/2022 8:08:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Fed has barely started raising interest rates but the air is already seeping out of the housing bubble.
New single-family home sales plunged by 16.6% from March and were down 26.9% year on year. New home sales dropped to the lowest level since the lockdown in April 2020.
New home sales are often viewed as a leading indicator of the state of the overall housing market.
The unsold inventory of new homes spiked by 34,000, a historic month-to-month leap. There were 440,000 unsold new homes (seasonally adjusted), the highest level since May 2008 in the midst of the housing bust. Both, the month-to-month and year-over-year increases in unsold new homes were the largest leaps ever recorded, both in numbers of unsold houses and in percentage terms.
The biggest drop in new home sales occurred in the under-$400k price range, indicating that high prices and rising mortgage rates are squeezing middle-class Americans out of the housing market.
WolfStreet broke down the current dynamics in housing.
Homebuyers struggle with spiking mortgage rates which make the high home prices that much more difficult to deal with. And with each increase in mortgage rates, and with each increase in home prices, entire layers of potential buyers abandon the market, and sales volume plunges.”
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) data for April 2022 shows mortgage applications for new home purchases decreased 10.6% compared to a year ago. Compared to March 2022, applications decreased by 14%.
The Federal Reserve blew up this housing bubble when it artificially suppressed interest rates and bought billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. Now the central bank has pricked the bubble by allowing rates to rise ever-so-slightly.
What the Fed giveth, the Fed taketh away.
Mortgage rates began to fall in late 2018 as the economy tanked and the Federal Reserve ended its post-2008 rate hike cycle. Rates continued to fall as the Fed pivoted back to quantitative easing and then dropped through the floor with the rate cuts and QE infinity in response to the coronavirus. The big spike in mortgage rates we’re seeing today started as the Fed began talking up monetary tightening to tackle raging inflation.
Tight housing inventory has kept home prices up even as sales have dropped, but as more and more people are squeezed out of the market, prices will likely begin to fall. While we may not see the kind of crash we saw in 2008, a housing market bust will reverberate through the economy as rising housing prices squeeze Americans already struggling to make ends meet.
And as Peter Schiff pointed out in a tweet, falling prices will wipe out home equity for millions of homeowners.
But lower house prices will offer little relief to new buyers, as rising mortgage rates, utilities, taxes, maintenance, and insurance offset the drop.”
Inventories are low as well. Demand should not go away completely, especially in desirable places to live.
This most happen because of economics. But, people are leaving BLUE cities and states ij droves and are buying houses for way over asking price—I don’t see this slowing down much.
But I'll say this, we had a lot of cash offers. The ultimate buyer paid cash, actually. So interest rates rising are not the entire story of the sowdown.
We should definitely see less bidding wars. Do you mind me asking what part of the country your mom sold her house in? I just can’t see the great exodus from New York and California slowing down too much regardless. That is my uneducated opinion.
A 25% correction would be good for a lot of markets in the US.
Some places like Boise have doubled in three years. The prices are going to need to come down to make up the difference in the interest rates going up.
The fact is there are parts of US that have gone up in price way to fast. A 100% increase in a three year period is never sustainable.
People will eventually move to places like Wheeling, WV because it less than half the price of other cities.
Many people do not need to go into the office anymore to make a living. That means there is no reason to buy a house in the suburbs of city X anymore.
This could well be a new long term trend. And it could help the local economies of some economically struggling areas, if they experience an influx of new residents. A certain number of people will move to Wheeling, buy that house for half the price it would cost elsewhere, and benefit financially.
How many people love living in New York or other big cities? If you don’t need to live in New York or its suburbs to be in commuting distance of the office, and work is structured so you don’t need to go into the office 5 days a week, that’s a fundamental transformation.
Places like Wheeling could benefit—but only if they have local officials with zero tolerance for crime.
Safety in your home and neighborhood is priceless.
Ping
Until a family moves from Philly or NYC and brings the rainbow flags, their emotionally imbalanced on the spectrum kids(Because feminist Mom waiting till she was 42 to have kids with her old damaged eggs) and their general insane leftist ideas. Then your neighborhood goes to crap when they vote for AOC types to represent you.
Our granddaughter just sold her house for $40k above list price. There are three other houses in my cul-de-sac and all of them went on the market within a month of each other. All three sold within days of being listed. This all happened withing the last 45 days. The market in my area seems to be doing quite well.
Pushing rates up does little to stop buying in those markets where the purchases are mostly or largely from Communist China, they are buying to get some of their cash out of their country (diversifying political risk). They use cash, they do not borrow... and thus are totally unaffected by interest rates.
The net effect is to block more and more USA buyers (who almost always use credit). The same (high) number of foreign buyers.... less USA buyers.....more of our housing will become foreign owned.
Raising interest rates would have worked 50 years ago before the Communist Chinese and other foreign buyers entered our local realty markets on a mass scale. Today, it will only serve to prevent Americans from buying homes.
Sellers in red areas should require an addendum to the contract of sale in which the buyer swears not to register or vote Democrat, so the neighborhood is not ruined.
Back in the bad old days (way before I was RE licensed) when Jim Crow was for real there were towns and neighborhoods where part of the contract was a promise not to sell to blacks.
She sold in South Jersey, Philly metro area. People trying to escape from NY aren’t coming to South Jersey I think, for the most part. The buyers in this case weren’t from there anyway.
“that’s a fundamental transformation.”
Yes, it was Obama who wanted to do just that. However, it was COVID that achieved it.
My daughter no longer goes into the office. Her husband only does in a couple days a week.
For many people that work on a computer over the internet there is no reason to go into the office anymore.
It saves them on commuting expense. My daughter now puts more mileage on her vehicle on the weekend than during the week.
Now that Elon is providing high speed internet to anywhere through Starlink you do not need to be even in a suburb of a major city.
I know a guy who has worked for Goldman Sacks for years. He owns a house in CT. He used to take the train everyday into Grand Central Station and walk to the office in Manhattan.
He now works from his house on Nantucket. He is selling the house in CT.
This has been the trend now for two years. With the difficulty employers have retaining employees companies have to be more flexible. That means working from home is not going to change.
So, what does that mean to us? The prospect for commercial office space in big cities is not good. It probably will not get better soon.
Nantucket must be getting over run with Finance guys, a friend who works at Merrill does the same.
Nantucket always has been over run with Finance/Wall Street types. They are the only ones who can afford to live there. Them and old money.
They have owned this vacation home there for about twenty years. It was a $600K fixer upper when they bought it.
I stayed at a house there down the road from Kerry's old place. A friend of a friend was a aide to a Goldman guy in Chicago who rented the house for two weeks at some unbelievable fee, like 20k/week. He couldn't use it one week and told his assistant to invite their friends, which they did.
“...neighborhoods where part of the contract was a promise not to sell to blacks.”
When I sold my home in Dallas, TX a few years ago I sold it in four days way above asking price. I had five lookers and four of the five were companies representing chinessse mainland people buying home as rental property investment. I sold at a lower price to a local couple. I heard that the vast majority of buyers during the past few years in Texas has been foreign nationals.
Zillow had the avg 30 yr rate at 5.06 today. They have steadily floated down from 5.5 a few weeks ago. My house hit a new high a few days ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.