Creating Urgency for sellers!!
How quickly does financial turmoil impact the housing market? HousingWire by Mike Simonsen / Apr 7, 2025 at 12:23 PM Is this article about Stock Analyses? YesNo While the housing market seems like the least of our financial worries right now as stock markets are melting down around the globe, we track housing here at HousingWire, so it opens the question: how quickly could we see impact in the housing market and in which data would we see it first? We have two competing forces that will impact home buyer demand. Mortgage rates, of course. If rates fall, that obviously helps demand. But if the economy shrinks, unemployment spikes, and people are worried about their wealth or income, those are negative forces. Rates vs. recession. What if rates fall because the economy tanks? Which force wins? This is tricky because we haven’t had to worry about the economy for 15 years. In housing, it has been an interest rate game for a very long time. Rates go up, demand weakens and inventory builds. Rates go down, demand increases, inventory falls, prices rise. In the past three years, we’ve had rising and elevated interest rates, and inventory is way up. But in that time employment has been very strong. The U.S. economy has been growing better than anywhere in the world. So, housing has been primarily an interest rate game.