Nicole Friedman of The Wall Street Journal tells us that the residential real-estate market is being hindered by mortgage rates, limited inventory. She writes:
The highest mortgage rates in 23 years are dragging down home sales to their lowest levels since the subprime crisis period.
Sales of previously owned homes in 2023 are expected to dwindle to a rate not seen since at least 2011, when the U.S. population was smaller and the country was still recovering from one of the worst housing crises ever, according to many economist forecasts.
Chen Zhao, economics research lead at real-estate brokerage Redfin, estimated that total existing-home sales in 2023 would amount to around 4.1 million, which would mark the smallest number of sales since about 2008, the year that Lehman Brothers collapsed and sparked the global financial crisis. […]
Just 16% of consumers surveyed by Fannie Mae in September said it was a good time to buy a home, matching the record low in data going back to mid-2010.
Yonatan Hochstein and his wife have been looking to buy a house in New Jersey for about a year.
“Definitely inventory seems really limited,” he said. “We’ve found the longer we’re waiting, interest rates have kept going up and home prices have kept increasing, so it’s getting harder and harder.”
Read more here.
