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The Housing Shortage Is About To Get Worse—Don’t Expect Builders To Save the Day

Just a few months ago, builders couldn’t put homes up fast enough to appease the hordes of eager buyers. They boasted about lengthy waitlists, even holding lotteries to choose those lucky enough to purchase their newly constructed homes.

Those days are now over as the housing market corrects after two years of runaway prices.

Buyers are now canceling orders and extracting themselves from waitlists as higher mortgage rates have pushed their dreams of owning new construction beyond their financial reach. Sales are down.

Builders are responding by throwing out incentives, like spaghetti against a wall, to see which ones attract buyers. Some have begun cutting prices, and the majority are slowing down the pace of construction—despite the nation’s…

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Are house prices going down?

After U.S. inflation cooled more than expected last month, you may be wondering whether or not the housing market is cooling off. The answer is yes — but with an asterisk.

The median sale price for a home in June 2022 was $428,400, an 11.2% increase since the same time last year. Even though this is a double-digit increase in prices, it’s also the smallest year-over-year increase “in nearly two years,” Redfin market analyst Tim Ellis says.

Data indicates that while U.S. home prices decreased 0.4% from June to July, other factors are still impacting home affordability. Even though home prices remain high, Ellis says the market is balancing out due to a variety of factors, including higher mortgage rates and decreased demand.

Redfin data shows…

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A Buyer’s Bonanza or a Seller’s Dilemma? Where the Housing Market Sits Now and What It Means for You

The real estate market seems to have a split personality.

On the positive side for homebuyers, the number of properties for sale shot up by a record-setting 30.7% this July compared with the same month last year, according to a recent Realtor.com® report. That’s the most significant increase in active listings in the data’s history. And in another hopeful sign for buyers, the share of homes seeing their prices slashed—19.1%—hit a record not seen since 2019.

Yet on the flip side, the $449,000 median list price of homes is a 16.6% increase compared with last year. And the average time a home spends on the market before it sells remains significantly lower (a mere 35 days) than in pre-pandemic times.

So how does a savvy homebuyer make sense of…

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New-home market 'at a crossroads' amid uptick in canceled contracts, incentives

Homebuilders across the U.S. are shifting their strategies and financial outlooks amid changing consumer demand for housing.

But where the jury is still out is whether the trend toward elevated canceled contracts, more incentives and lower demand for housing is settling out to pre-pandemic levels — when demand for homes was still higher than historic norms — or will continue to worsen.

The nation's publicly traded homebuilders, in earnings calls reporting their most recent quarter's financial performance, are seeing similar trends and patterns across their portfolios as the housing market shifts amid higher interest rates and fears of a recession. The three-month period that ended in June is the first full quarter that illustrates how…

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Texas metros top ranking for apartment demand

As new residents continue to flood in, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston now have the highest apartment demand in the nation.

The largest Texas metros took the top three spots in a ranking of the increase in apartments needed to meet projected demand by 2035 in a study commissioned by the National Apartment Association and the National Multifamily Housing Council.

The study calculated the needed percentage growth in local rental stock as well as the absolute number of new apartments necessary to meet demand over the next 13 years. The combined weighted average ranked the Texas metros highest in projected rise in demand, according to the Austin Business Journal.

With a 2.6 percent growth rate and 117,107 new apartments needed to meet…

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Housing economists: Mortgage-rate volatility likely to level off even with Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes

Despite an interest-rate hike of three-quarters of a percent by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, and additional increases likely still to come, some housing economists aren't expecting another big surge in mortgage rates now or in the coming months.

A recent slowdown observed in the U.S. housing market has largely stemmed from the sudden jump in mortgage rates felt in late spring and early summer, in line with the Fed's decision to move up interest rates in an ongoing effort to combat inflation.

Existing-home sales declined for the fifth straight month in June, down 5.4% from May and 14.2% from the prior year, according to the National Association of Realtors. Unsold inventory was at three months' supply nationally in June, up from 2.6…

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Austin-Round Rock housing market returning to pre-COVID normalcy

New housing market data showing increased inventory and decreased residential home sales points toward a slowing housing market for the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The deceleration is bringing the Austin area housing market back "to pre-COVID normalcy," according to the Austin Board of REALTORS (ABoR).

“These numbers are a breath of fresh air for a housing market that has been holding its breath,” ABoR president Cord Shiflet said in a statement. “The trajectory of our market over the last two years was unsustainable and it was in no way going to last. The resurgence of activity after the COVID-19 pandemic, historically low interest rates and massive job growth created record-high housing demand in our market."

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