Good article here, for anyone interested in how the pandemic and current market compares to 2008. Of course no one can truly predict what will happen, but a good exploration nonetheless. So you don’t have to click, here are the nuggets:
In the first week of April, U.S. search interest in the phrase “when is the housing market going to crash” jumped 2,450 percent compared to the previous month, and is now more popular than anytime since 2004, according to Google. The search terms “should I buy a house” and “sell my house” also reached record interest.
The median sale price of an existing home in the U.S. was $313,000 in February, up nearly 16 percent from a year earlier, when a 3 to 5 percent annual increase is considered healthy, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors
The answer will depend largely on where you live and how the pandemic continues to reorder buyer priorities, but it will hinge on two trends: rising mortgage rates and incredibly tight inventory in some markets, which will likely keep demand strong through the rest of 2021
Nationwide, housing inventory was at a record-low 1.03 million units at the end of February, down 29.5 percent from a year earlier, a record decline, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Unlike the last major housing crisis, in which sale prices plummeted and many buyers were stuck with risky, adjustable-rate financing, today the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage remains near record lows, lenders rely on stricter underwriting requirements, and homeowners have more liquidity.
Lawrence Yun [National Association of Realtors. chief economist] predicts the volume of U.S. home sales to drop 10 percent compared to the year-ago period, as mortgage rates climb closer to 3.5 percent, up from about 2.7 percent at the start of 2021.
[Mr. Yun] also expects home prices to keep rising in the short term, because of more than a decade of sluggish housing construction, hobbled by restrictive zoning and high labor costs.
But with prices jumping close to 20 percent in some outlier markets, Mr. Miller [Jonathan J. Miller, a New York appraiser who analyzes markets nationwide] does not expect the gains to continue apace for long, in part because the appeal of many suburbs is affordability, relative to big cities. The extent to which remote work will remain a feature of life after the virus is also still unclear.