Seen on Tom T’s twitter account, from cnbc.com:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100876300#_gus
At a brokers open house in Northern Virginia this week, real estate agents said they are already seeing the effects of higher rates on the ground and in the homes they’re trying to sell.
“It has gotten a lot quieter, which is a shame because historically the rates are still very low,” said Ruth Griel with Prosperity Mortgage.
(did her refi pipeline dry up?)
Realtor Timothy Landis said, “I’ve heard some people say ‘that’s really going to cut down on business’ because people are now going to say ‘hey, I missed the boat, I’m going to hold off, I’m not going to go out and purchase'”.
(it should cut down on bidding wars)
From the cnbc printed article: “It’s having a kind of chilling effect on the market,” said Mark Beardsley, a Realtor with Long and Foster. “What’s happening is we are pricing down. If they were qualified for 600, now we’re looking at 550 and below.”
What realtor Mark Beardsley said on the video, “It’s having a kind of chilling effect on the overall temperature of the market. It’s coming down from white hot to red hot. But there are still so many buyers out there and there’s so little inventory that we’re still having a lot of people bidding on the good properties.”
(Exactly)
And so it begins…
In the 20th Century it was the down payment which essentially governed purchasing power for high priced homes, but low DPs and ultra-low rates shifted the limiter to pure leverage. People these days are buying as much as they can finance, which means interest rate changes affect them directly.