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Tag: singlefamilyhomes

  • How the U.S. housing market got stuck in the ’80s

    How the U.S. housing market got stuck in the ’80s

    The Federal Reserve’s inflation fight has been particularly brutal for anyone not already a U.S. homeowner before interest rates and mortgage rates rose to 15-year highs.

    With mortgage rates around 7.2% to kick off the post–Labor Day period, the difference between the rates on a new 30-year home loan and on all outstanding U.S. mortgage debt (see chart) has not been so wide since the 1980s.

    It’s the 1980s again in the U.S. housing market.


    Glenmede, FactSet

    “Generally, climbing interest rates curb demand and cause housing prices to fall,” Glenmede’s investment strategy team wrote, in a Tuesday client note, but not this time.

    Instead, U.S. homes remain in critically low supply after more than a decade of underbuilding, and with most homeowners who already refinanced at low pre-pandemic rates being “reluctant to leave their homes,” wrote Jason Pride, chief of investment strategy and research, and his Glenmede team.

    Also, while homes prices have come off their prepandemic highs, they still were fetching $416,000 in the second quarter, based on median sales prices, above $358,700 in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to U.S. Census and HUD data.

    “Until the supply gap is filled by new construction, home prices and building activity are unlikely to decline as meaningfully as they normally would given the headwind from rising rates,” the Glenmede team said.

    Read: Housing affordability is now at its worst level since 1984, Black Knight says

    The Glenmede team, however, does expect more pressure on consumers in the coming months, particularly as student-loan payments resume in October and if the Fed keeps interest rates high for a while, as increasingly expected. The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield
    BX:TMUBMUSD10Y,
    which underpins the U.S. economy, was back on the climb at 4.26% Tuesday.

    Meanwhile, shares of home-vacation rental platform Airbnb Inc.
    ABNB,
    +7.23%
    rose 7.2% on Tuesday, after the Labor Day weekend, and 66.4% higher on the year so far, according to FactSet.

    Don’t miss: New York City cracks down on Airbnb and other short-term-rental listings

    Shares of Invitation Homes Inc.
    INVH,
    -0.91%    ,
    which grew out of the last decade’s home-loan foreclosure crisis to become a single-family-rental giant, were up 14.3% on the year, according to FactSet.

    Dallas Tanner, CEO of Invitation Homes, said he expected “the rising costs and the burden of homeownership” to continue to benefit his company, in a July earnings call. The company recently bought a portfolio of about 1,900 homes and has been snapping up newly constructed homes. Companies can borrow on Wall Street at much lower rates than individuals.

    Stocks closed lower Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average
    DJIA
    off 0.5%, and the S&P 500 index
    SPX
    0.4% lower and the Nasdaq Composite Index
    COMP
    down 0.1%, according to FactSet.

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  • U.S. housing starts surge as builders rev up single-family home construction in May, while a housing shortage drags on 

    U.S. housing starts surge as builders rev up single-family home construction in May, while a housing shortage drags on 

    The numbers: Construction on new American homes jumped 21.7% in May, as homebuilders ramp up building single-family homes to meet strong demand from buyers.

    Housing starts rose to a 1.63 million annual pace last month from 1.34 million in April, the government said Tuesday. That’s how many houses would be built over an entire year if construction took place at the same rate in every month as it did in May.

    Economists were expecting a slight decline of about 0.8%. The numbers are seasonally adjusted.

    This is the second month in a row that starts are up. The pace of construction was the highest since last April, when starts hit a 1.8 million pace.

    The surge in construction this spring was led by the Midwest.

    Both single and multi-family construction rose in May. Keen interest from would-be home buyers is creating strong demand for new homes. These buyers continue to face a lack of options in the resale market. 

    Building permits, a sign of future construction, rose 5.2% to a 1.49 million rate.

    Key details: As the weather warms up, construction pace has picked up considerably.

    The construction pace of single-family homes rose 18.5% in May while apartment building rose 28.1%.

    Home builders were most active in the Midwest, where housing starts rose by 67% from the previous month. The Midwest also led the nation in terms of single-family construction.

    Permits for single-family homes rose 5.2% in May while permits in buildings with at five units or more rose 7.8%.

    Housing starts are up on an annual basis for the first time in nearly a year. The annual rate of total housing starts rose 5.7% from last May.

    Big picture: New construction is a bright spot in an otherwise despondent housing market. For the buyers who brave 6% mortgage rates, there are few options in the resale market, which continues to funnel demand for new homes. 

    In fact, demand is so strong that homebuilders are pulling back on sales incentives, such as price cuts, the National Association of Home Builders reported on Monday. 

    Builders also reported that they were feeling upbeat about the housing market for the first time in nearly a year.

    What are they saying? “To say that we did not see this one coming would not even come close to capturing the degree to which the May residential construction data caught us off guard,” Richard Moody, senior vice president and chief economist at Regions Financial Corporation, wrote in a note.

    “This is without question an exaggeration of the underlying reality and a reminder that the housing starts data are among the most volatile and random of the government’s major economic indicators,” Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets, wrote in a note.

    “Having said that,” he added, “the housing sector broadly appears to be healing remarkably fast after enduring a historic shock in affordability last year, when 30-year mortgage rates more than doubled.”

    Market reaction: U.S. stocks
    DJIA,
    -0.59%

    SPX,
    -0.39%
    were down in early trading on Tuesday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note
    TMUBMUSD10Y,
    3.721%
    rose above 3.7%.

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