- Home sales are barely above the pace experienced in the years that followed the housing crash. This time around, it’s because would-be buyers can’t afford the one-two punch of high home prices and high mortgage rates, and sellers can’t afford to lose their low rates.
Not a lot of people are buying or selling homes at the moment.
In January, total home sales came in at 4.7 million. That level is “only modestly above the weak rate experienced in the wake of the Great Recession between 2008 and 2010,” Wells Fargo economists wrote in a recent research note. January is the latest data available for both new and existing home sales. In the years before the pandemic, that total sales figure tended to hover around 6 million. During the pandemic housing boom, it was even greater.
The current economy doesn’t resemble that of the financial crisis, but there are a couple things happening in the housing world that can explain this conundrum. Home prices soared throughout the pandemic and mortgage rates followed once the Federal Reserve entered a tightening cycle to tame scorching-hot inflation. The combination of high home prices and high mortgage rates hurts demand, so fewer people are buying homes because they cannot afford them. On the other hand, some who own a home and either secured a low mortgage rate during the pandemic or are mortgage-free aren’t selling; the phenomenon referred to as the lock-in effect only exacerbates an existing shortfall of homes due to decades worth of underbuilding.
“The tepid pace of home sales can not be blamed on a recession,” Wells Fargo economists wrote. “Rather, the main factor weighing on residential activity continues to be adverse affordability conditions. In addition to high mortgage rates, home prices continue to rise.”
Home prices are no longer experiencing double-digit increases, and mortgage rates have eased but not enough to reverse the last five years. Since February 2020, home prices have increased 45%, and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate is 6.67%; in Feb. 2020, mortgage rates were 3%. The country is still short almost four million homes, too.
“A meaningful improvement in the adverse affordability conditions which persist currently seems unlikely given the elevated rate environment and structural shortfall of available homes keeping home prices on an upward trajectory,” Wells Fargo senior economist Charlie Dougherty told Fortune in an email. “Given affordability will remain extremely unfavorable for most buyers, the pace of home sales is expected to remain weak and not far from the low levels hit in the aftermath of the financial crisis.”
Wells Fargo only sees home sales improving modestly over the next several years. Moody’s prediction isn’t much different. It anticipates little improvement in transaction volumes this year before modestly improving next year.
But for now, “the interest rate lock-in is behind the recessionary low levels of existing home sales, which account for the lion’s share of total home sales,” Moody’s housing economist Matt Walsh told Fortune in a statement.
He echoed Wells Fargo that extremely low housing affordability is a headwind to sales. The average monthly principal and interest payment on a home has more than doubled in the last five years, Walsh said. Moody’s housing affordability index, which measures the degree to which a typical middle-income family can afford a mortgage payment on a median-priced home, is averaging at its lowest level since the 1980s, he added. And Walsh doesn’t see mortgage rates dropping meaningfully by the end of the year.
Others have made the connection between home sales in the current housing cycle and the Great Financial Crisis, even though the two economic periods are very different. Home prices aren’t plummeting now as they had then and unemployment isn’t skyrocketing either. As Redfin chief executive Glenn Kelman once told Fortune, the economy might be booming but housing has fallen into a recession.
Housing bust forecaster ‘Poison Ivy’ Zelman earlier warned that existing home sales were probably at their lowest since the Great Financial Crisis and that she saw years of depressed sales through this year. JPMorgan senior markets economist Joe Sedyl previously wrote “sales of existing homes are very depressed, as bad as after the global financial crisis.”
