Housing Market Update | April 2022 with Erik Braceland

Will mortgage rates continue to rise??Will home prices ever fall??The answers to these questions and more, right here, right now.

Welcome back to another real estate market update!?I’m Erik Braceland with Braceland Homes here in sunny San Diego, California, where we guarantee the sale and/or purchase of your home.?Here on the Braceland Homes Blog I share the latest news related to buying and selling residential real estate.

COVID finally caught up to me over the weekend, so I'm battling back to productivity with this post.?Had my fill of being idol.?Watched a lot of Romcoms and sitcoms.?You know, cause laughter IS the best medicine.

I’m going to start right off the bat with the impact of rising mortgage rates on the housing market. Unless you've been in hibernation, you're fully aware that interest rates have been steadily on the rise all around us.?And you can see here that mortgage rates, on an average 30-year fixed home loan, have shot up from 3.11%, at the end of last year, all the way to 4.76% last week!?That's 1.68% in just three months!??

Freddie Mac is telling us “Mortgage rates are likely to continue to move higher throughout the balance of 2022.?Although the pace of rate increases is likely to moderate, much of the increase in rates in early 2022 is in anticipation of what will happen later this year, especially with Federal Reserve interest rate policy.”?

So, there it is.?More price hikes on the way for the money you borrow for your next home purchase, but now they should come at a more moderate pace. And that’s because the Fed has risen their rate, and mortgage rates tend to follow that. I realize this is something on all our minds, but how are mortgage rates effecting the overall housing market???

Mike Simonsen from Altos Research, said it best when he said,?“We keep watching for it, but there are absolutely no signs of market slowdown anywhere in the data. If anything, we’re seeing the market continue to heat up.” And it's true, we’re in a very, very busy housing market. We've been in one for the last couple of years, all through the time we've been messing with COVID. All through last year and certainly coming into this year. Perhaps you were thinking, or hoping, the market’s starting to moderate, but we’re still seeing a very, very busy market right now.

If we start to break that down by traffic maps, the National Association of Realtors just came out with the most recent buyer and seller traffic maps. Let’s start here with the buyer traffic map. You see all over the country, with few exceptions, Strong traffic from buyers. The rise in mortgage rates is not slowing down buyer traffic across the country. We can certainly say that. So, as we head into this spring housing market, very, very strong buyer demand. And the rise in interest rates is not slowing buyers down across the country.?If you are enjoying this content...please let me know...in the comments below!

You know, if we look at the other side of this coin, seller traffic, very, very weak to very weak seller traffic across the country. Matter of fact, there's hardly anything for sale at all in places like New England and the northern Midwest states.?But across the country, very, very few sellers. And so, what happens? Any time we’re in that type of market and we have strong buyer demand, the lack of sellers keeps that upward pressure on home prices. And I’m going to talk about that in just a minute.?

If there’s any sort of good news relative to sellers and listings, it was last month, where you can see here, active listings increased in this country for the first time in six months. If you go back to the fall of last year, around September, we started to kind of fall down in active listings. Any homes that come to the housing market were quickly consumed by the buyers in the market. And we’re starting to see that tick up. A very little bit, but nonetheless a tick rise in active home listings.?We definitely need more still, because if you go back to March of last year, and compare it to now, you see we are about 100,000 active listings short, this March as compared to last year. So, we need more listings to make things better for you home buyers out there.

For those of you testing the temperature of the water before you jump in to the housing market ocean, things are still very competitive for home buyers, and home sellers are still very much in control.?Whichever side of the fence you find yourself, it's essential you align yourself with an Awesome real estate professional, agent, realtor or whatever you prefer to call them, to get the most from your home sale...or to get you the home you want.??

I think it’s articulated well here by Fortune Magazine. They say "Now, more industry insiders are throwing out their previous forecasts and replacing them with more bullish short-term outlooks. Indeed, some experts say the 2022 spring housing market might go down as one of the most competitive on record."

Here's more evidence of that.?These are numbers of home showings, over the last five Februarys, with this year having the highest numbers yet. And we already looked at the dismal lack of housing inventory, and the rising mortgage rates.?So now we have less houses than ever.?More buyer demand than ever.?A higher cost of money than we've seen in several years, that continues to rise. Any more stellar news for us in the housing market Erik?

I do want to show you how all of this, is keeping that upward pressure on home prices. This is the latest look from CoreLogic on home price acceleration.?As we came through last year we said okay, prices seem to have peaked, if not, you know, plateaued. We were hovering at about 18% home price appreciation for four months.?Then through November, December, January numbers ratcheting up slightly in the amount of appreciation year over year, and it seems that upward trend is continuing.?

So really just a very, very competitive housing market right now. But don't stress about it.?If you and your family are ready for a move, just jump in.?Like I always say, if there's a will, there's a way!?I currently have availability for one more new client this month, and I'm accepting a limited number of new clients, for the month of May, that I'll personally work with, one on one, to help sell and/or buy a home.?Please call or text 619-947-3560 if you are interested in working together.?I hope to hear from you.?If you're a regular reader, or you're following my videos, we'll probably get along famously, and have a great time together reaching your real estate goals!

If you've enjoyed this content or found it helpful, please hit that like button, and let me know in the comments below.?And please share this content with someone you think might benefit from it.

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That's all for now.?I'm Erik Braceland, and thanks once again for reading.?Check back regularly for insightful, new content!