The Blubber

A buyer on a $3,000 monthly budget can afford a $419,000 home with a 7.7% mortgage rate.

They lost $38,000 in purchasing power since last October. They could've bought a $457,000 home with a 6.6% rate. And they could have purchased a $595,000 home with 3.5% rates in 2022.

Housing affordability is the worst on record, per the National Association of Realtors.

It would take some combination of up to a 28% decline in home prices, a more than 4% reduction in 30-year mortgage rates, or up to a 60% growth in median household incomes to bring home affordability back to its 25-year average, per Black Knight.

The average American buyer faces one of the most unaffordable housing markets, where first-time buyers would need to earn as much as $90,000 in 2022. Now, housing prices sit at an almost four-decade-high unaffordable level.

In 2019, first-time buyers needed to earn about $70,000, but in 2022, just three years later, the needed earnings increased by $20,000. Zillow Group Inc.'s senior economist Nicole Bachaud gave a statement regarding how homebuyers with less income struggle in the market.

Bachaud: “The scales are shifted toward homebuyers with higher incomes and a better financial background. This will be the norm until we get more inventory in the market.”

The National Association of Realtors notes that first-time buyers made up the smallest fraction of sales in 2022 at just 26%. Recent Freddie Mac data also revealed that the 30-year fixed mortgage reached 6.65%, climbing for the fourth week in a row.

A New York broker, Kimberly Jay, who works with Compass, gave another statement sharing how parents were giving properties and how the city was full of wealthy people. A third of first-time homeowners relied on families or friends for gifts and loans pre-pandemic.

Jay: “I see some parents giving gifts for the full price of a million-dollar property... This is a city with wealthy people.”

Read more: https://unusualwhales.com/news/housing-now-at-almost-four-decade-high-unaffordable-levels