Mortgage applications to purchase a home rose 4% last week from the previous week and were a remarkable 21% higher than a year ago, the 9th consecutive week of gains and the highest volume in more than 11 years! The average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage decreased to 3.30% from 3.38%. (CNBC)
Retail sales, a measure of purchases at stores, at restaurants and online, increased a seasonally adjusted 17.7% in May from a month earlier. Expect more GOOD NEWS headlines like this over the next few weeks and months after weeks/months of bad headlines. While the higher you climb the further you can fall is true…..so too is it true that when you have fallen to a deep low, chances are it’s up, up, up from there! (WSJ)
Builder sentiment jumped a striking 21 points in June to 58, the largest monthly increase ever in the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. Any reading above 50 indicates a positive market. In April, it plunged a record 42 points to 30. Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions jumped 21 points to 63. Sales expectations in the next six months rose 22 points to 68. Buyer traffic more than doubled from May to June, from 22 to 43.
“The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply.”
– Steven Roach, Yale University, citing growing debt and diminished savings.
This is bad for American savers but will likely benefit commercial and investment real estate investors who act now as a new wave of foreign buyers enter the market.
Housing starts that measure how many single-family homes builders break ground on probably will fall to 770,000 this year, the lowest level since 2015, according to the NAR. The 1.47 million properties on the market at the end of April was the lowest ever recorded for the month, according to NAR data. Americans created 11.4 million households in the 10 years through 2019, according to Census data. Builders sold 5.2 million single-family homes in the same period. In the prior decade, they sold 10.4 million new houses. Supply disruptions and the COVID-19 lockdowns that ensued have made the situation worse. (Housingwire)