Americans’ views of the housing market have plunged as interest rates continue to rise because of government-fueled inflation.
Gallup released new polling data showing that only 21% of Americans say now is a good time to buy a house, down 9 percentage points from the previous year. This year and last year during the Biden administration are the only times that fewer than half of Americans said it was a good time to buy a house since Gallup began asking in 1978.
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Investors bought 30% fewer homes in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same time period last year, as high borrowing costs pressured investors out of the housing market, according to real estate brokerage Redfin Tuesday.
Besides a brief plunge in the second quarter of 2020 in response to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the decline was the steepest since 2008, and surpassed the 27.4% overall decline in home purchases nationwide, Redfin reported. The pandemic ultimately boosted demand for homes in suburban areas, sending investors on buying spree as they raised rents in those areas, in some cases by double digits, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
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Which direction is the housing market going? To discern that requires understanding exactly where we are now, and how we got here. These are valuable points to ponder since Americans’ homes are often their most valuable asset and largest store of wealth, and those homes are hemorrhaging.
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For many readers, the above title will conjure up memories of the 2008 housing crash caused by the proliferation of subprime mortgages and the subsequent tsunami of defaults. But a better corollary for the coming Biden bust is the Carter crash that occurred three decades earlier. During the final two years of Carter’s term, sales of existing and new homes collapsed because the Fed was forced to raise interest rates sharply to get double-digit inflation under control. This, in turn, produced double-digit mortgage rates that priced millions of potential buyers out of the market.
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Housing costs in Pennsylvania are rising, but the General Assembly has not prioritized the expansion of housing supply as an area of concern. As rents and housing prices rise across the Commonwealth, inaction now could cause pain in the near future.
Housing prices statewide rose by 14% from 2020 to 2021, as The Center Square previously reported, and in central Pennsylvania, apartment rents have increased 40% since 2017. Rents in Philadelphia increased almost 10% in 2021. The Lehigh Valley has had similar pressures, with one-third of households spending at least 30% of their income on rent or mortgages.
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U.S. existing home sales soared to a 15-year high in 2021 fueled by low interest rates and remote work, which boosted a competitive housing market, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) announced Thursday.
Home sales totaled 6.12 million in 2021, representing an 8.5% increase from 2020 and the highest level since 2006, according to the NAR. The inventory of unsold homes as of December 2021, 910,000, the lowest figure since January 1999.
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Home prices are at a 45-year high, pricing many buyers out of an historic seller’s market, new data published by CoreLogic show.
Annual home prices were 18% higher in October of this year than they were last October, and were also the highest recorded in the 45-year history of a Home Price Index published by the global property company.
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Median home prices surged in the third quarter of 2021 in almost every housing market in the U.S., the National Association of Realtors said in a report Wednesday.
The median price of a single-family home increased in 182 out of the 183 markets tracked by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Prices grew by 10% from the previous year in 78% of the 182 markets.
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Zillow is closing down its home buying and selling business and laying off 25% of its workforce after the online real estate company missed its third-quarter earnings estimate.
The company announced in a statement attached to its earnings report Tuesday that it would be shutting down its Offers program, which buys and sells houses, after the company reported a net loss, partly due to failures in its Offers division. Zillow attributed the change to its inability to accurately forecast the housing market.
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