The US housing affordability crisis continues to worsen as mortgage rates skyrocket to two-decade highs while the cost of an average home is still at bubbly levels. Financing costs are through the roof, and anyone earning less than $100,000 has been priced out of homeownership.
House prices are sliding, and sales are plunging as the Federal Reserve hits the pause button on quantitative easing this year with the most aggressive interest rate hikes in four decades to cool the red-hot housing market spurred by low interest rates and tight inventories during the pandemic.
The latest real-time rent data from the property research firm CoStar Group shows apartment rents in the US are fading from record highs for the first time in almost two years, according to WSJ.
The pandemic housing boom hit a peak and should start rolling over as rising inventory forces some home sellers to slash prices. The weight of soaring mortgage rates and increasing inventory are the possible markings of a top that has already led some sellers in major US cities to cut listing prices.
The red hot pandemic-era housing market is cooling as historically tight available inventory shows signs of reversing. An affordability crisis has removed millions of new home buyers as the number of active US listings soared 18.7% in June from a year earlier, the most significant increase in Realtor.com’s data going back to 2017, according to Bloomberg.