Dilemma . . . Do I make a jump to a mortgage at 6 to 7% just to have a bigger house? There is more to this than just interest rates. Building supplies as NDd mention have been an issue. If they are decreasing in cost, builders can lower prices to help sell new houses. Existing homeowners are still trapped by their 3% mortgages – by New Deal democrat Higher interest rates have created a bifurcation in the housing market. While builders can build smaller models and lower prices, existing homeowners can’t do the former and generally won’t to the latter. As a result, homebuilders have been able to take advantage of the declining in commodity prices (like for lumber) to maintain volume at lower prices. Meanwhile existing home sellers have been
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NewDealdemocrat considers the following as important: Homeowners, Hot Topics, Interest rates, US/Global Economics
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Dilemma . . . Do I make a jump to a mortgage at 6 to 7% just to have a bigger house? There is more to this than just interest rates. Building supplies as NDd mention have been an issue. If they are decreasing in cost, builders can lower prices to help sell new houses.
Existing homeowners are still trapped by their 3% mortgages
– by New Deal democrat
Higher interest rates have created a bifurcation in the housing market. While builders can build smaller models and lower prices, existing homeowners can’t do the former and generally won’t to the latter.
As a result, homebuilders have been able to take advantage of the declining in commodity prices (like for lumber) to maintain volume at lower prices. Meanwhile existing home sellers have been unable or unwilling to sell their homes mortgaged at 3% in order to buy a home which will be mortgaged at 6% or 7%.
That pattern continued in July, as existing home sales declined to a 5 month low of 4.07 million on an annualized basis (the past 2 years of data are shown below):
Meanwhile the median price for an existing home is still up 1.6% YoY.
For all intents and purposes, many homeowners are trapped in their existing homes by the all-time low mortgage rates they were able to lock in early in the pandemic.
Tomorrow we will see if the more economically important new home sales continue their recent rebound, or whether the increase in mortgage rates back above 7%, and perhaps the waning of commodity deflation does some further damage.