Eye On Housing
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s Weekly Application Survey, for the week ending November 8, 2019, showed a 5% increase in its Purchase Index and 13% increase in its Refinance Index from a week earlier on a seasonally adjusted basis. This increase occurred despite the slight increase in the 30-year fixed mortgage rate to 4.03%, thus reflecting growing optimism concerning the economy… Read More ›
Boosted by low mortgage rates, existing home sales, released by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), rose to 17-month high in August. Total existing home sales, including single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, climbed 1.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.49 million in August, the largest gain since March 2018. On a year-over-year basis, sales were 2.6% up than… Read More ›
New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, combined with recent NAHB survey data, show a mismatch between the actual prices of new homes and the prices buyers expect to pay—providing further evidence for the growing problem of housing affordability. At the end of August, the Census Bureau released 2018 data from… Read More ›
As revealed in a previous post, 55% of buyers actively searching for a home to buy in the second quarter of 2019 have been looking – unsuccessfully – for three months or longer. Why is it taking these buyers that long to pull the trigger? The most important reason is they can’t find a home at a price they can… Read More ›
A national poll in the second quarter of 2019 revealed that 12% of adults are thinking about buying a home in the next 12 months. Of that group, 41% are already actively engaged in the process of finding a home to purchase, which is a smaller share than a year earlier, when 50% of prospective buyers were engaged in the… Read More ›
An earlier post revealed that only 12% of adults polled in the second quarter of 2019 are prospective home buyers (they are planning to buy a home in the next year). The poll asked these buyers to estimate the share of homes available for-sale in their markets they believed they could afford. As the graph below shows, affordability expectations are… Read More ›
The second quarter 2019 edition of the NAHB Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) introduces a new analysis of residential construction in manufacturing-intensive areas, in addition to updating trends for previously-defined areas of the exurbs, suburbs and rural markets. The HBGI data find that manufacturing areas experienced above-trend growth for single-family construction in 2017, followed by declines in 2019 as the… Read More ›
A second quarter 2019 NAHB poll revealed that only 12% of adults are prospective home buyers, i.e. they are planning to buy a home in the next year. These prospective buyers were asked about their expectations for housing availability going forward. As the graph below shows, 20% expect the search for a home to become easier in the months ahead,… Read More ›
As revealed in a previous post, 53% of buyers actively searching for a home to buy in the first quarter of 2019 have been looking – unsuccessfully – for three months or longer. Why is it taking these buyers that long to pull the trigger? The most important reason is they can’t find a home at a price they can… Read More ›
Many people start thinking about a home purchase well in advance of actually engaging in the process of finding a home. In a national poll in the first quarter of 2019, 13% of adults reported planning a home purchase within the next year. Of those prospective buyers, 46% are already actively involved in trying to find a home to buy. … Read More ›