Mortgage rates have doubled over the past year and this has hit housing affordability hard. How much housing prices will retrench is still up in the air. Consider the whole premise housing prices in America are about to fall like a stone may be overdone. Hard economic times could very well take a greater toll on the price of intangible assets and paper promises than on things like housing.
After tumbling for the first time since 2012 in July, Case-Shiller’s 20-City Composite Home Price index was expected to drop for the third straight month in September (the latest data available) as mortgage rates soared, crushing affordability; and it did, with the 20-City Composite down 1.24% MoM (as the YoY rise slowed from 13.06% to 10.43%)…
Following the declines in new- and existing-home sales, analysts (unsurprisingly) expected to see pending home sales drop for the 10th month of the last 11. They were right BUT the magnitude was remarkable.
After tumbling for the first time since 2012 in July, Case-Shiller’s 20-City Composite Home Price index was expected to drop even faster in August (the latest data available) as mortgage rates soared, crushing affordability.
Falling stock markets have wiped out more than $9 trillion in wealth from U.S. households, putting more pressure on family balance sheets and spending.
Analysts expected Case-Shiller Home Price growth to continue its modest deceleration in August (the latest available data in this heavily lagged and smoothed data set), but the result was a doozy: the 20-City Composite index tumbled 0.44% MoM, far below the 0.20% expected increase, and a sharp decline from the downward revised 0.19% increase in July; more importantly, this was the first sequential drop in home prices tracked by Case-Shiller since March 2012, or ten and a half years.
Record-high housing prices in the US could collapse by up to 20 percent over the next year if a recession sparked by Joe Biden’s inflation takes hold, a top Wall Street economist has warned.
Real estate investors have largely done well for the past few years. But with higher interest rates, things could be about to change. The U.S. Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rates by 0.75 basis points on Wednesday, marking the third such hike in a row.
U.S. mortgage rates jumped more than half a percentage point this week, an increase not seen in decades and one sure to price even more Americans out of the housing market.
Amid surging layoffs in the real estate market, slumping homebuilder sentiment, soaring rates and plunging mortgage applications, it is no surprise that analysts expected a drop in Housing Starts and Permits in May (-1.8% MoM and -2.5% MoM respectively). Those numbers were destroyed as Housing Starts crashed 14.4% MoM and Permits plunged 7.0% MoM…