8 Predictors of Housing Prices
The National Association of Realtors has published a report looking at different factors as predictors of housing prices.
The study looks at 8 factors:
– gas prices
– proximity to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods
– proximity to sports facilities
– legalization of marijuana
– effect of temperature change
– nearness to casinos
– closeness to highways
– whether there are trees on the street
Click here to read the report and find out how these factors affect housing prices.
If you – or somebody you know – are considering buying or selling a home and have questions about the market and/or current home prices, feel free to contact me on 617.834.8205 or [email protected].
Read Which broker will actually sell my home?
Andrew Oliver is a Realtor with Harborside Sotheby’s International Realty. Each Office Is Independently Owned and Operated
You can REGISTER to receive email alerts of new posts on the right hand side of the home page at www.OliverReports.com.
@OliverReports
Who is the Typical Home Buyer and Seller?
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has released its report on the profile of the typical home buyer and seller nationally. The infographics below show the highlights of the report:
Is this the end of mortgages under 4%?
The “will they won’t they” saga of when the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates took another yesterday as the jobs report saw with 271,000 new jobs added, a decrease in the official unemployment rate to a flat 5 percent, and a pick up in wage growth to an annualized rate of 2.5 percent, the fastest pace in about 6 years. The yield on the 10 year Treasury (the bench mark for 30 year Fixed Rate Mortgages – FRM) jumped to 2.34%, bringing speculation that we could be about to see the end of mortgages under 4%. (more…)
Home sales: from feast to famine?
The old saying is that there are three things that matter in real estate: location, location and location.
In the same vein there are three things that matter in real estate statistics: never rely upon one month’s numbers, never rely upon one month’s numbers….well you can guess the third one. (more…)
Mortgage rates: déjà vu all over again
Well the Federal Reserve did not increase short-term interest rates this week and there was little movement in mortgage rates, which remain under 4% for the 30 year fixed rate (FRM) and close to historic lows:
The underlying assumption behind the Fed’s forecasts and those by groups such as the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) is that there will, inevitably, be an increase in inflation at some point and that interest rates will start to rise as that becomes more certain.
How accurate have past forecasts been? (more…)
Mortgage rates dip below 4% again – where next?
National mortgage rates for the 30 year FRM (Fixed Rate Mortgage) dipped below 4% again this week after seven weeks above 4%.
Source: Freddie Mac
And the 30 year FRM is still lower than it was a year ago:
Source: Freddie Mac
Forecasting that mortgage rates will rise has been a favourite occupation of soothsayers ( or economists as they like to call themselves) for a couple of years now. My last article on the subject in June was Mortgage rates “forecast to reach 4.5% by year end”, quoting the Mortgage Bankers Association.
When will the Federal Reserve raise rates? (more…)
Why there are so few houses for sale
For the past two years the main story in the housing market has been the lack of inventory, of houses for sale.
But why is that? (more…)
“Buyers are coming back in force”
That quote comes from Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors (NAR), following publication of the NAR’s Economic and Forecast Update.
Highlights of the report include:
– Existing home sales in May were the highest since 2009, when there was a homebuyer tax credit
– Pending home sales hit a 9 year high
– New home sales hit a 7 year high
– Housing permits for new homes hit an 8 year high
– and
Mortgage rates “will reach 4.5% by year end”
In a report this week the Mortgage Bankers Association stated: “Our forecast has mortgage rates increasing to about 4.5% by the end of 2015, and rising further next year.” Click here to read the full forecast.
Mortgage rates do fluctuate and vary from lender to lender. For example, despite the headlines, it was possible to find quotes at the end of this week for 30 year jumbo mortgages under 4%, while both 15 year FRMs and 5/1 ARMs were available at 3 1/8%. (more…)
4 reasons home prices will keep going up
Here are 4 reasons home prices will continue to increase over the longer term: (more…)
Will baby boomers kill the housing market?
Will a flood of baby boomers cashing out their home equity be too much for the housing market to bear? That is the question I was asked recently.
One of the difficulties in trying to make personal decisions, like whether to buy a house today in the town of your choice, based on long-term, national forecasts (for example, boomers cashing in their housing chips) is the risk of missing out on a lot of known positives – i.e., home ownership – in fear of unknown possible negatives.
But let’s look at some of those big questions. See also 4 reasons home prices will keep going up . (more…)
Mortgage rates are rising….
The temperature’s rising….and so are mortgage rates, with the 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage (FRM) back to its level at the beginning of the year.
I published two reports earlier this year: Mortgage rates: How low can they go? on January 17 and Have mortgage rates bottomed? on February 14. In them I set out some basic information about mortgage rates and the “spread” between the FRM and the yield on 10 year Treasuries*.
Here is the weekly data for this year, showing the FRM at 3.85%. The rate dropped by about 1/4% earlier in the year and has now reversed that drop:
Source: US Treasury, Freddie Mac
Why did mortgage rates drop?
After years of dithering the European Central Bank finally embarked on a program of Quantitative Easing (buying Government securities) in March, but in anticipation of the start of the program investors worldwide went on a bond buying spree driving yields on Government securities to extremely low levels. The chart below shows yields in January (blue), the lows reached (orange), largely in February, and current yields (gray). Quite a ride!
Source: US Treasury, Tradingeconomics.com
And one final chart, showing the movement in exchange rates this year
Source: tradingeconomics.com
Whence from here?
A lot of the strength of the US Dollar earlier this year was based on the assumption that interest rates would rise soon. As the economy has produced less than forecast growth, in part because of the winter weather and collapsing oil price, in part because of the strength of the dollar, so expectations of rising interest rates have been pushed out further.
The median and average spread in the table on mortgage rates and 10T yields above are 1.70 and 1.72. On Friday the yield on the 10T dropped to 2.14, meaning the spread was 1.71 based on a 3.85% FRM rate.
Late on Friday HSH.com published this comment: “Mortgage rates firmed a little bit more this week, cresting at the highest levels in six months, but it appears that the four-week rise in rates is over, at least for now. The global selloff in bonds — essentially, a repositioning by investors in light of changes in currencies and central bank programs — pushed mortgage rates up by a little more than a quarter percentage point from the 2015 lows of mid-April.”
Trying to time the mortgage market is a bit like trying to time the stock market. More to the point, mortgage rates below 4% are very attractive. The bigger challenge for buyers is finding a house at a time of widespread scarcity.
*The benchmark for the 30 year mortgage is the 10 year US Treasury yield. What does that mean? In general, banks sell the mortgages they issue to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac who in turn package them into pools and sell them to investors. Because mortgages have higher risks than US Treasuries, investors demand a higher yield than they would accept from Treasuries. The difference in yield between mortgage securities and Treasuries is called the spread.
If you – or somebody you know – are considering buying or selling a home and have questions about the market and/or current home prices, feel free to contact me on 617.834.8205 or [email protected].
Andrew Oliver is a Realtor with Harborside Sotheby’s International Realty Sotheby’s International Realty® is a registered trademark licensed to Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates LLC. Each Office Is Independently Owned and Operated
You can REGISTER to receive email alerts of new posts on the right hand side of the home page at www.OliverReports.com.
@OliverReports
Have mortgage rates bottomed?
That’s a bit like saying: is this weekend’s storm the last major one of the winter? The answer is….maybe. Nevertheless, mortgage rates have moved up recently, largely reversing the drop experienced in January when geopolitical factors – the usual suspects, Greece and Russia – contributed to a drop in the yield on the US 10 year Treasury from 2% to 1.7%. That yield has now recovered to 2%, and the 30 year mortgage rate is more or less back to where it was at the beginning of the year, depending on which survey you read (see below for details and comments). (more…)
The Mortgage Mistake?
In this article The Mortgage Mistake from a recent issue of The New Yorker, sent to me by fellow Harborside Sotheby’s agent, Joe McKane, the writer argues that incentives to encourage home ownership – including subsidized mortgage rates and tax deduction of mortgage interest – do little to increase the number of homeowners. Other Western countries have similar rates of home ownership without the same range of incentives.
Almost all the economic benefits of the mortgage deduction go to people earning more than $100,000 a year. Result: people overinvest in housing and underinvest in other types of asset. And because people tend to invest more in housing when the economy is doing well and less when it is doing poorly, housing tends to amplify the economy’s ups and downs.
The trigger for this article is the new 3% down mortgage offered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for first-time home buyers (see my recent 3% down mortgages are back post.) Default rates for mortgages with down payments of 3-10% are almost 50% higher than for those with down payment above 10%. Thus, the New Yorker writer argues, while the new mortgages may turn more low-income people into homeowners, it will also likely increase the default rate.
Two questions come to my mind: is increased home ownership an unarguably good thing? And does mortgage interest deduction encourage home ownership?
(more…)
Mortgage Rates drop to 3.66%
The 30-year national average mortgage rate, as reported by Freddie Mac, started 2014 at 4.5% with forecasts that by year end the rate would reach over 5%. For a number of reasons, which I will go into again more fully in my post this coming Saturday, the rate in January 2014 was the highest for the year and ended 2014 at 3.87%.
This year the slide has continued with the rate reaching 3.66% this week, the lowest level since May 2013 and not far from the record low of 3.31%. The decline in rates seems likely to trigger renewed buying interest and may shorten the traditionally quiet winter market.
Source: Freddie Mac
If you – or somebody you know – are considering buying or selling a home and have questions about the market and/or current home prices, feel free to contact me on 617.834.8205 or [email protected].
Andrew Oliver is a Realtor with Harborside Sotheby’s International Realty
Sotheby’s International Realty® is a registered trademark licensed to Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates LLC. Each Office Is Independently Owned and Operated
You can REGISTER to receive email alerts of new posts on the right hand side of the home page at www.OliverReports.com.
@OliverReports
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