Eye On Housing
While home buyers may have slightly more optimistic expectations about future housing availability (see earlier post), there is no improvement in their outlook for affordability. In the fourth quarter of 2019, 79% say they can afford fewer than half the homes available in their markets, which is higher than the 76% with that opinion a year earlier. This marks the… Read More ›
The shortage of lots that has been hindering the housing recovery eased somewhat in 2019, but remains elevated by historical standards, according to a recent survey conducted by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The survey consisted of a set of special questions included on the instrument for the September 2019 NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI). The survey asked… Read More ›
Despite help from the lowest mortgage rates in three years, an NAHB poll* conducted in the third quarter of 2019 shows that a strong majority of prospective home buyers continue to have poor expectations about being able to afford the homes for-sale in their markets. In fact, 80% say they can afford fewer than half the homes currently available where… Read More ›
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 ›