As many of you suspect, the market is shifting. This graph from Mortgage News Daily, I have some benefits from also being a Lender, shows that Existing Home sales have declined by about a million a month since mid 2020. New home sales have dropped off as well, but we are seeing a pretty big rebound after the recent dropoff.
We are seeing more homes with price decreases and more days on market. Where this ends nobody knows but thanks to two major dynamics, the Fed acting ignorant and claiming that they didn't know inflation was going to be anything more than transitory, where anyone with half a brain could see that all this money printing and free handouts during the "Plandemic" was going to lead to dramatic inflation, and the deliberate destruction of our energy independence by the Biden Administration which has led to historic prices for gas and it will most likely get much worse, has helped put our economy into what appears to be, yet another, recession. But don't worry about Gas prices, the Regime has plans for you to buy expensive electric cars with middling range, & slow charging times (compared to a fill up). A great benefit to electric cars is the almost 50% degradation in battery efficiency when it gets cold or very hot, things that we never see here in North Texas, and the occasional flash fire from the Lithium Ion cells. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. I'm a fan of the tech but to me buying an electric car is akin to running Linux instead of Windows, Chrome OS or Mac OS. It's just not ready for prime time for the vast majority of people especially fans of towing.
Yet, I'm still not forecasting big price declines. Inflation is real and it is much higher than reported and it will hold values up. We may have a short period of minor price declines but inventory is low and demand is sky-high here in DFW for reasons I mentioned in a previous post. Rents are rising quickly, and regardless of how high home prices are and how high interest rates have risen, rents are rising quickly also. The days of 2% rent increases, year over year, are over, at least for the time being. Now expect 10-20% a year. So renters are desperate to stop the bleeding and will pay whatever they have to to get into a home with a fixed payment, even if that means an 5 year Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM) with a 5 year fixed rate, because that will at least mean that they can get a handle on their monthly budget for awhile.
So if you are putting your plans to buy on hold while the market "corrects itself", I think that is a mistake. The correction, is going mostly one way, and that's upwards.
For those believers out there, we can all say some prayers for our Supreme Court for their courageous decision to end their infamous Roe v Wade decision that took the power of decision from the states and made Abortion a temporary "Right".