Housing is on everyone’s mind these days for many reasons. One’s own home value, the value of a future purchase, but mostly, it is one of the single biggest markets (by dollars) around. And when a whale of a market turns, it changes consumer behavior (and the economy).
This morning, the weekly gauge for mortgage purchase applications went cliff diving:
On a longer term basis, here is how treasury yields have pushed mortgage applications around over time:
Generally with a topic like this, one’s own mind wants to be on one side of a fence or the other, not sitting on top of it. Housing is going to crash or housing will be fine. Perhaps it just hangs out in the middle of those two? Can’t print a news headline that sells with that.
Calculated Risk, a housing / core economic data blog who was on top of the housing bubble of the 2000s, has his outlook here (as of 5/13/22). I pasted the end of it below:
As such, his prediction is a middling situation (stall = nominal price growth, negative real price growth – so a home owner won’t see headlines that they are losing money), which isn’t what readers’ hearts want, but seems highly reasonable.