Mike Simonsen

1 week ago | housingwire.com | Mike Simonsen

Weekly pending home sales disappointed in the last week of April, with 10% fewer than the same week in 2024. To be specific, single-family home sales came in 8% fewer than the same week last year, and condo sales came in 19% fewer. Nationally, weekly pending home sales saw only a small rebound after the Easter holiday from two weeks ago. It’s not only in the transaction count. Prices looked soft last week too. The median price of the weekly pending sales came in below the same week last year.

2 weeks ago | housingwire.com | Mike Simonsen

Last week’s pending home sales slipped to 68,000 single-family contracts — an expected Easter holiday lull that marks the first sub-2024 weekly tally in six weeks. Buyers remain mortgage rate-sensitive, of course. April’s tariff-fueled spike in U.S. Treasury yields pushed borrowing costs higher, but that’s subsiding just a bit and a typical mortgage payment is roughly 4% cheaper compared to last year.

3 weeks ago | housingwire.com | Mike Simonsen

Available inventory of unsold homes grew by 17,000 this week. That’s the biggest single-week inventory gain in nearly three years. The supply of homes on the market continues to grow. Three years ago was when mortgage rates were spiking as we exited the pandemic economy. Inventory climbs when interest rates climb. This spring, mortgage rates have stayed higher for longer than expected, and the inventory of unsold homes on the market continues to expand.

1 month ago | housingwire.com | Mike Simonsen

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.

1 month ago | housingwire.com | Mike Simonsen

The newest data on outstanding residential mortgages has been released via the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)’s National Mortgage Database. It tells a pretty strong story on the financial strength of the American homeowner. Even after three years of rising interest rates and a painful housing market recession, the lasting effects of the post-pandemic boom still dominate the average American’s financial condition. Forty percent of homeowners have no mortgage at all — a staggering number.