Challenge for the Fed: Majority of U.S. Mortgage Rates Were Fixed During Pandemic Lows According to Black Knight, a company that provides mortgage technology and analytics, over one-fourth of all mortgages are from 2021. Another 18% of mortgages are from the year before the epidemic. That year, a 30-year fixed-rate loan’s average cost fell as…

January Saw a Significant Increase in Pending Home Sales Pending home sales increased for the second consecutive month in January, the biggest since the pandemic recovery in June 2020. According to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), Pending Home Sales Index (PHSI) increased by 8.1% in January to 82.5%, in addition to a December gain…

2023 Kicks Off with Slow Housing Starts With U.S. housing starts declining 4.5% month over month to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 1.309 million units in January, high-interest rates continued restraining residential construction activity. As a result, the housing starts fell for the sixth consecutive month, the longest run since 2009. Building for single-family…

Spring Market Upswing? Although prices have started dropping since last June, they are still higher than before. Now that demand is returning to the market due to a minor decrease in mortgage rates; prices are pushing back. According to CoreLogic’s most recent data, U.S. home prices were 6.9% higher than they were a year earlier…

Housing Market Meltdown May Be Behind Us, Economists Believe Many economists and industry leaders believe that the worst housing market slump is behind us. Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, stated that the housing market was “stronger than anyone could have hoped” in January. Even though a Yahoo! Finance piece claims that recovery won’t happen right…

Lower Mortgage Rates Urge Buyers To Reenter The Market The housing market stalled last year as mortgage rates increased. Homes began receiving fewer offers and stayed on the market for a long time. As a result, some homeowners opted to delay their selling. But as interest rates start to decline, buyers are again entering the…

Home Sale Prices Increase Incrementally with Lower Mortgage Rates, Redfin Reports According to a new Redfin study, the median home sale price in the U.S. rose by 0.9% from a year earlier to $350,250 for the four weeks that ended on January 15th. This increase was the largest in a month. There continues to be…

Mortgage Demand Jumps Nearly 28% as Interest Rates Drop to Lowest Point in Months The Mortgage Bankers Association’s reported a roughly 28% increase in mortgage application volume from the prior week. In addition, mortgage rates have been at their lowest since September. Since the end of the holidays, consumers have returned to the market aggressively,…

Consumer Housing Sentiment Reports Show Slight Improvement Fannie Mae’s Home Purchase Sentiment Index (HPSI) dataset for 2022 is now final, and year-end data for December revealed a rise of 3.7 percentage points, settling at a rate of 61%, just above the Index low recorded in October 2022. Three of the Index’s six key components—homebuying conditions,…

November New Home Sales Up 5.8% Over the holiday season, HUD and the Census Bureau revealed that new home sales increased by over 6% from October and exceeded the November forecast. According to the data, sales of new single-family homes increased to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 640,000 in November, up 5.8% from the…