The experts say that the majority of homeowners are locked into their homes by their low mortgage rate, and if/when today’s high rates come down, then the inventory of homes for sale will bounce back.
Boy, are they going to be disappointed.
For the last 10-12 years, San Diegans have been buying their ‘forever home’, whether they knew it or not. They are locked into their home all right, and their low rate is only one of the reasons – with two other facts being more of a burden:
Difficulty of finding a better home at a reasonable price.
Capital-gains taxes in the six figures.
Ultra-low mortgage rate.
If mortgage rates magically came back to the 3% to 4% range, would it make sellers shrug off the first two? If rates came down to the 2% to 3% range? They would still need a very good reason to move, and endure the first two problems.
Yoohoo – home sellers? You may want to adjust your price expectations!
What does the practically-vertical trend in active listings mean? It means home buyers are getting pickier. They are emboldened when they pass on a house, and then see everyone else passed on it too. It causes them to be less crazy next time.
The rest of the year should be similarly conservative, and only the very best offerings will sell.
But that’s fine – is it a big deal for the rest to wait until next year?
To find the most affordable beach towns for homebuyers in 2023, we started by using a federal listing of beaches and their locations. We aggregated Realtor.com listing data for every home put on the market in the past year located within a one-mile radius of each beach. We then selected the most affordable beach towns by price per square foot. Only locations with at least 50 properties within a mile of the water in the past year were included.
We limited our list to just one beach town per state to ensure geographical diversity. And although we did favor places on the ocean, we also included a few bayside locales.
Despite what you may have assumed, in some places, a home by the beach can cost about the same as an average U.S. home—or less. So let’s dive in.
A home should be a visual expression of the person who lives there, right? While this may be true most of the time, the advice could change when it comes to selling your house. According to a new study by Zillow, certain paint colors can make your house sell for more—and some hues can even have the opposite effect. “People don’t buy homes every day, so they’re trying to quickly process a lot of complex information in an area where they don’t have a lot of experience,” Amanda Pendleton, Zillow’s home-trend expert, explained in a statement. “That uncertainty is likely why buyers rely on color as a powerful visual signal that a home is modern and up-to-date, or tired and needs maintenance.”
“Buyers have been exposed to dark gray spaces through home improvement TV shows and their social media feeds,” Mehnaz Khan a color psychology specialist and interior designer in Albany, New York, said in a statement. However, the reason gray paint colors can make your home sell for more might also have to do with more subconscious reasons. “Gray is the color of retreat,” Khan added. “As we come out of the pandemic and return to our hectic lives, buyers want home to be a refuge. They want to withdraw and escape from the uncertainty of the outside world, and rooms enveloped in dark gray can create that feeling of security.”
San Diego is the #1 area that homeowners don’t want to leave! Don’t you get the feeling that we are going to out-perform every other real estate market in America for a long time to come?
Today we have 2,293 active listings of attached and detached homes in the county – population 3.3 million!
Hat tip to listing agent Ben who is always gracious about me doing videos of his properties for sale!
This is a custom home built for an Ecke family member as part of the deal when they sold part of their farm, which was then developed into the Encinitas Ranch golf course plus 1,100 tract homes.
Powell’s goal was to crush the real estate market…..
In June 2022, Powell told reporters that spiked mortgage rates would help to “reset” the U.S. housing market, and that “we need to get back to a place where supply and demand are back together and where inflation is down low again, and mortgage rates are low again.”
Then in September 2022, Powell told reporters that we had officially entered into a “difficult correction” that would restore “balance” to the housing market. At the end of November 2022, Powell went a step further, and said a “housing bubble” had formed during the Pandemic Housing Boom.
Last week, Powell said, “The housing market is bottoming and may already be improving.” He made the comment after the central bank kept benchmark rates steady but indicated more hikes may be needed later this year.
“Activity in the housing sector remains weak, largely reflecting higher mortgage rates,” Powell told reporters after the rate announcement. “Certainly, housing is very interest rate-sensitive, and it’s the first place, really, or one of the first places, that’s either helped by lower rates or is held back by higher rates. And we certainly saw that over the course of the last year. We now see housing putting in a bottom and maybe moving up a little bit. We’re watching that situation carefully.”
In his prepared statement yesterday, he said, “Although growth in consumer spending has picked up this year, activity in the housing sector remains weak, largely reflecting higher mortgage rates.”
Then he said,“We think housing inflation will be coming down significantly over the course of the rest of this year and next year. Consumer inflation has eased since last summer due mainly to falling energy and core good prices. In contrast, rents and other housing inflation has been moving higher.”
What he doesn’t see…..
Powell’s comments get turned into headlines, like this:
Potential home sellers take one glance and – even though they aren’t quite sure what he means – they decide the market is no good and that it’s smarter for them to wait for better times. It would take a flood of supply to effectively reset the real estate market, yet his policy is doing the opposite. Plus, his higher rates are pricing out the marginal buyers (the regular people), which creates less competition for those who can withstand higher rates – the affluent buyers.
The end result is affluent people chasing the few sellers who really need to move – just the type of buyer who can, and will, pay more to get what they want now….which will help to keep prices elevated.
What’s likely to happen:
The off-season will commence shortly and there will be fewer sales than ever, with an occasional deal here and there. The trendline will look softer than during the selling season, which will cause Powell and others to abandon the bottom talk and instead declare that their ‘housing inflation’ – code for rising prices – is coming down. Everyone will take it as a sign that the recession is finally here!
Then the 2024 selling season will get rolling in February, confounding the experts even more.
It might take a couple more years before they start believing that home sales are seasonal – if they ever do.
A nice combo pack here with two bedroom suites downstairs and private pool. It’s a little light on the premium upgrades but it had enough dazzle to attract multiple bidders. This was a standard tract house when sold new for $422,500 in 2000:
It’s amazing how she endured two of these guys overdosing and 44 years of rock and roll and still be on the road doing it as good as ever. Here’s how it all started – she quit smoking at age 60!
