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The housing market is now savagely unhealthy

Housing Wire

To get the housing market to be sane and normal again, we need inventory to get back in a range between 1.52 – 1.93 million ; this is still historically low, but this gives the housing market a breather from the madness that we see today. Housing is the cost of shelter to own the debt; it’s not an investment.

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Buyers and sellers agree: it’s a good time to enter the housing market

Housing Wire

Though prospective buyers revealed slight wariness in September, Fannie Mae reported buyer morale gained 6% in October, with 60% of respondents saying it is a good time to buy a home while those who believe it is a bad time fell to 35%. Compared to this time last year, the HPSI is still down 7.1 million Americans unemployed.

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You can’t buy what’s not for sale in the housing market

Housing Wire

The housing market functions differently than other markets because it can be characterized as a heterogeneous, thinly traded, illiquid market. In other words, it’s a diverse market with a wide variety of different homes of varying ages and levels of repair, and sales happen very rarely. The result is fewer sales.

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Housing Market Tracker: Inventory finally rises

Housing Wire

Can we now say that the housing market ‘s spring selling season is finally underway? Since 2020, the seasonal bottom for housing inventory has arrived several months later than normal, making it more complicated to track housing inventory data. In 2022, home sales collapsed in a waterfall fashion.

Inventory 544
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Housing Market Tracker: Spring inventory grows

Housing Wire

The spring housing market music is playing, and purchase application data and active listing inventory rose together last week. It has been cooling down even though we have had a tighter labor market, as I wrote about in the last jobs report. The fear of not having an increase in inventory this spring should be put to rest.

Inventory 518
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The savagely unhealthy housing market is now a nightmare

Housing Wire

Since March of this year, housing demand has been falling more and more, but inventory is still below the 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 levels, which is a nightmare. Because housing is shelter, people don’t sell their homes to be homeless; it’s where they live. The only way this happens is higher rates.

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Housing Market Tracker: Higher rates crush purchase apps 

Housing Wire

We created the weekly Housing Market Tracker because housing data has been so wild since 2020. The housing market madness persisted last week as inventory fell and higher mortgage rates took a bigger bite out of purchase application data. A traditional seller is a conventional buyer most of the time.