Housing Wire

DECEMBER 31, 2020

Jeff Tucker Zillow Senior Economist. This is the fourth installment of our economist Q&A series, as we work to answer the top 2021 housing market questions. Every Tuesday in December, HousingWire interviewed a top economist in the HW+ Slack channel. The 2021 housing market forecasts have focused on everything from home prices to mortgage rates. In this installment, HousingWire interviewed Jeff Tucker, senior economist at Zillow , on his forecast for next year.

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Realtor

OCTOBER 29, 2020

When you’re a first-time home buyer approaching the finish line in the journey to your new home, you want nothing to go wrong, right? That’s why we’ve put together a home closing checklist, which outlines your action points in those few days leading up to settlement. Keep this closing process list handy to know you’ve done what you need to in order to close the deal. 1.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 28, 2020

Although I had pockets of joy in 2020, these moments were subsumed in a haze of stress, uncertainty and fear for our country. And, at times, I have found it difficult to keep these emotions from clouding my economic thinking. But despite all the sorrow and frustrations of this year, I have found solace in the immortal world of math, facts and data. From this stronghold I have been able to see past the chaos and view the economy and the future of the housing market through the lens of my core eco

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 17, 2020

The average U.S. mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed loan fell four basis point this week to 2.67% – the lowest rate in the Freddie Mac ’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey’s near 50-year history. This week’s mortgage rate broke the previous record set on Dec. 3 and is the first time the survey has witnessed it fall below 2.7%. “The housing market continues to surge higher and support an otherwise stagnant economy that has lost momentum in the last couple of months,” said Sam Khater, Fred

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 17, 2020

2020 has been a remarkably strong year for the housing market. Sales volume has remained elevated compared to last year since about mid-June, home values are growing more quickly than they have in 15 years and homes are typically selling a full three weeks faster than a year ago. Incredibly, next year’s housing market outlook is poised to be much stronger.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 14, 2020

What a crazy year we have all been through. Last year, I visited Japan, London, Puerto Rico, Oregon and Las Vegas twice. This year I had fewer visits than that to my local barber and I was ecstatic to be there. This was the year we relearned to appreciate small things. Adventure and excitement were out, and safety was in. On the economic front, COVID-19 was the mother of all exogenous shocks.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 30, 2020

While the United States may not have been prepared to combat a deadly virus, a quick and robust response from the Federal Reserve , along with changing consumer preferences, created a perfect storm that resulted in a record year for the housing and mortgage industries. Mortgage rates would fall to record lows 16 times throughout 2020, with origination volume expected to eclipse $4 trillion.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Even prior to the pandemic , housing inventory had hit record lows, and the problem has only gotten worse as demand continues to rise. Total home sales are outpacing new listings by a wide margin every month, and real estate tech company Homesnap foresees the shortage continuing in 2021 unless more sellers enter the market. The divide between supply and demand is striking: compared to last year, total new listings increased.22%, while total sales increased 19.29%.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

The average U.S. mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed loan remained unchanged at 2.72% this week, Freddie Mac said in a report on Thursday – the second week in a row rates have sat at the lowest recorded level in the survey’s near 50-year history. The average fixed rate for a 15-year mortgage also remained unchanged from last week at 2.28%. After another week at the record low, there have now been 18 consecutive weeks when average mortgage rates have been below 3%.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

The pandemic has shifted the pecking order of the real estate industry’s location-location-location axiom for many homebuyers — high-cost and high-density urban is out, while suburban is back in vogue and rural is experiencing a bit of a revival. Many real estate investors were serendipitously ahead of this shift even before the pandemic started, driven by both affordability and an affinity for overlooked markets.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 24, 2020

The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced new conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for 2021: $548,250. This is a 7.5% increase from 2020’s limit of $510,400 and marks the fifth consecutive year of increases from the FHFA. In 2016, the FHFA increased the Fannie and Freddie conforming loan limit for the first time in 10 years, and since then, the loan limit has gone up by $131,250.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

The average U.S. mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed loan fell this week to 2.72%, Freddie Mac said in a report on Thursday – the lowest rate in the survey’s near 50-year history. This week’s rate broke the previous record set on Nov. 5 by 6 basis points. The average fixed rate for a 15-year mortgage also fell by 6 basis points to 2.28%. After this week’s record drop, there have now been 17 consecutive weeks when average mortgage rates have been below 3%.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR) on Thursday, alleging a series of violations of antitrust law, including commission arrangements and consumer disclosure requirements. NAR has adopted a “series of rules, policies, and practices governing, among other things, the publication and marketing of real estate, real estate broker commissions, as well as real estate broker access to lockboxes, that have been widely adopted by NAR’s m

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Existing home sales came in at a whopping 6,850,000 , beating estimates with the highest print since 2006. Days on market fell from 36 days to 21 days on a year-over-year basis. Cash buyers remain at a historically high level of 19%, the same as last year, while sales grew 26.6% year over year. The housing market is hot. While we celebrate these strong numbers, keep in mind these three points: First, expect the data to moderate, so don’t freak out when we see the rate of growth cool down.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 13, 2020

In today’s red-hot market, you need a real estate agent who can get creative, play hardball in negotiations, and help you stand out from the pack in a bidding war. And not everyone — even an agent recommended to you by a friend or loved one — is up to the task. Want to make sure you’re getting the best real estate agent possible for your home purchase?

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 2, 2020

With Halloween now in the rearview mirror, we still have one more spook to survive in 2020 – and no, I’m not talking about the upcoming election. I’m talking about housing market crash headlines. The housing data has been wild this year. We’ve seen waterfall declines and parabolic rebounds. These dramatic peaks and valleys in the data have fed the demons of greed and fear that infest the minds our extreme housing bulls and the fierce housing market bears – leading to equally wild spe

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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 13, 2020

In the largest increase since 2013, luxury home sales rose 41.5% in the third quarter, according to a new report from Redfin. While sales in this segment of the housing market have skyrocketed, the sales of medium-priced homes went up only 3% and sales of affordable homes actually declined by 4.2%. “The luxury housing market normally takes a hit during recessions as wealthy Americans tighten their purse strings, but this isn’t a normal recession,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said in

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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 30, 2020

The National Fair Housing Alliance and nine other housing organizations filed a lawsuit against Redfin on Wednesday, accusing the online brokerage of racial discrimination and favoritism toward predominately white neighborhoods. “Redfin redlines communities of color in this digital age by setting minimum home listing prices in each housing market on its website under which it will not offer any real estate brokerage services to buyers or sellers,” the lawsuit states.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Realtors can usually count on their biggest season being spring, followed by summer, but nothing about 2020 has been normal, including home-buying patterns. With shut-down orders in the spring, summer became the new home-buying season, but homebuyers were still incredibly active in August. Now, believe it or not, fall home-buying season is in full swing.

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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 12, 2020

The health and economic crisis has made 2020 a horrific year for many Americans. Added to all that misery we had terrible fires in the West and hurricanes in the East. From my perspective, that ball in Times Square can’t drop fast enough hailing the end of this year. One might think that with all the bad juju circulating the planet lately, people would be extra careful not to bring more misery upon themselves.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

For Victoria Murphy, a RE/MAX agent in Oahu, Hawaii, getting her Realtor license was always a part of her plan. But shut-down orders in March helped push the college student to get it done. Murphy said the shut-down gave her enough time to get through the pre-licensing course and she was able to enter the real estate world feeling excited and determined.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Fannie Mae , the world’s largest mortgage financier, said mortgage lending this year probably will reach an all-time high of $3.9 trillion. The dollar-volume record will be boosted by $2.4 trillion in refinancings, the highest level since 2003 and more than double the level seen in 2019, the mortgage giant said in a forecast on Tuesday. “We continue to believe that a low-rate environment will support refinance demand over the forecast horizon,” Fannie Mae said in the forecast.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

Telecommuting is growing in popularity as more companies establish work-from-home protocols. With this new flexibility, nearly 2 million renter households could become homeowners , according to Zillow. Renters who are employed with a job that could be done remotely and might be priced out of their current market could afford to buy the typical starter home elsewhere in the U.S. “If remote work becomes a bona fide long-term option especially with the pandemic, that could reshape the U.S. ho

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

The deadliest pandemic in more than a century has failed to derail the housing market because of the lowest mortgage rates ever recorded coupled with a shift in how people use their homes. “The buyers are coming in because of the low interest rates – that’s the No. 1 reason,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors said in an interview with HousingWire.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Mortgage credit in August was the tightest in more than six years as a weak economy prompted lenders to tighten standards, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report on Thursday. The group’s Mortgage Credit Availability Index fell 4.7% to 120.9 last month, the lowest since March 2014, indicating stricter requirements to get loans. The index plunged from record highs seen in late 2019 after the COVID-19 pandemic caused the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Real estate agent safety has been a concern for years, as the job requires showing empty homes or homes occupied by others, and meeting new people, often alone. As September is Realtor Safety Month, the National Association of Realtors has released its 2020 Member Safety Report. According to the report, 31% of Realtors said they feel unsafe during an open house or showings, and 27% said they feel unsafe when meeting a new client for the first time at a scheduled location or property.

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Housing Wire

AUGUST 17, 2020

The pandemic is pushing homeowners out of the big cities and into rural and suburban areas , pushing up home prices in previously sleepy towns. In July, less densely populated areas showed more buyer interest than urban areas, Redfin said. Before the pandemic, 9% of homebuyers said they were searching for a home in rural areas. Now, 19% say they are looking at rural options.

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Housing Wire

AUGUST 22, 2020

According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency has been communicating with mortgage industry groups about delaying the implementation of a fee which would add a 0.5% surcharge to refinance mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac starting Sept. 1. According to the article, the FHFA is considering a delay to the adverse market fee implementation date, but is not planning to rescind it.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

For the third consecutive month, Fannie Mae’s Home Purchase Sentiment Index, a composite index designed to track consumers’ desire to sell or buy a home, gained 0.7 points in October to 81.7. Though that number is increasing, it’s slowed down compared to gains in previous months, including August’s 3.3 points rise and September’s 3.5. Compared to this time last year, the HPSI is still down 7.1 points, but has steadily recovered over 60% of its COVID-19 pandemic loss when April’s HPSI hit i

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Housing Wire

AUGUST 11, 2020

August is upon us, and the growth in the rate of new infections appears to be slowing. Vaccine development is progressing with some promising early results. The time has come to start thinking about what life will be like on the other side of this crisis. What can we expect post COVID-19? Logan Mohtashami Lead Analyst. Some things will not have changed.

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Housing Wire

AUGUST 27, 2020

Homebuyers who are juggling work and school from their home want more space, triggering an increase in the number of sales of large homes. According to Redfin , sales for large homes were up 21.2% year over year nationwide in July, compared to a 10% increase for medium-sized homes and a 2.3% increase for small homes. Redfin categorized large homes as those between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet, medium homes between 1,500 and 3,000 square feet, and small homes between 300 and 1,500 square feet.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

Urban District Realty , a Washington, D.C.-based brokerage, announced last week the launch of its custom real estate listing system, PROJETO. This system uses virtual reality technology which allows clients to be put in a virtual representation of a property that hasn’t been built yet. “PROJETO specifically is for homes that have not been built yet, these are homes that are still in development and that is something that when we did all of our research and looked around, no one else is doi

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 2, 2020

There is no place like home. The nature of the crisis this year and headed into 2021 because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized that fact. Even though we love our family members, we all need our space. Housing demand continues to remain quite strong for those fortunate enough to work in industries that are currently shielded from job loss, while also being more amenable to remote work.

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Housing Wire

AUGUST 7, 2020

After two consecutive months of advances , Fannie Mae’s Home Purchase Sentiment Index, a composite index designed to track consumers’ housing-related attitudes, intentions and perceptions, fell 2.3 points in July to 74.2. Year over year, the HPSI is down 19.5 points but still sits above April’s near-record low. According to the report, 53% of Americans now believe it is a good time to buy a home – an 8% decrease from June’s 61%.

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