For the first time ever, fewer than a third of all Americans want to invest in their own four walls.
Soaring inflation, rising interest rates, a first-quarter economic contraction, and a historically bad month for stocks in April are combined to sour their appetite, according to an annual poll by Gallup.
Asked if now was a good time to buy a house, only 30% answered the market research firm positively, a plunge of 23 percentage points from last year’s result.
It was also the first time the figure has dropped below 50% since Gallup began posing the question regularly in 2003.
“All major subgroups of Americans are significantly less positive about the housing market now than they were a year ago,” Gallup said in a statement on Wednesday.
By comparison, the previous record low was 50% in 2020 during the outbreak of the pandemic. Even at the height of the subprime crisis it never dipped below 52%.
Gallup said the survey was conducted from April 1 through 19, when the median sale price of U.S. homes hit a record $428,000 and as mortgage rates rose to their highest level in over a decade.
Double-barrel tightening
Among other factors, Americans have been spooked by red-hot consumer price rises, which grew at an annual rate of 8.5% overall in March, according to official government figures. The subcomponent that measures the overall housing market, or “shelter index” in official terms, saw its largest 12-month increase since May 1991.
In an attempt to stuff the inflation genie back in the bottle, the Federal Reserve lifted rates half of a percentage point on Wednesday, the largest hike since 2000.
It also presented a plan to drain the economy of over $1 trillion in excess liquidity every year potentially by selling assets on its balance sheet, known as quantitative tightening.
With the Fed’s double-barrel move telegraphed to Wall Street in advance, borrowing costs across the duration of the yield curve have drifted higher.
Yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury crossed the 3% mark on Monday, for the first time since late 2018. It also risks sending the economy into a recession, with gross domestic product declining in the first quarter.
An inflation-fighting Fed has big implications for the U.S. housing market, according to Moody’s Analytics. Of the 392 metropolitan statistical areas it looked at for Fortune, 96% are “overvalued” compared to local income levels, and 149 are overvalued by at least 25%.
With the Fed in tightening mode, the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell a whopping 13% in April, its worst monthly performance since the height of the global financial crisis. It’s not just growth stocks that have suffered, either: The broader S&P 500 is off to its worst start to a year since 1939.
“The combination of record-high home prices, rising mortgage interest rates, and a limited supply of housing is likely persuading Americans, for the first time in Gallup’s trend, that it is a bad time to buy a house,” Gallup said.
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