Home Prices Just Hit the Skids: ‘The Balance Is Shifting’

Source: Realtor.com — 

The housing market today remains in a hazy no man’s land, with neither buyer nor seller willing to surrender what little control they have.

Buyers face the dual enemies of high home prices and mortgage rates, which have been bouncing between 6% and 7% this year and ticked up this week to 6.5%, according to Freddie Mac.

Sellers bear their own hardships: a glut of competition. As buyers sit on the sidelines, homes for sale linger on the market, gathering dust and dashing sellers’ hopes of bidding wars and over-asking offers.

But there is some inkling of a power shift in the buyers vs. sellers battle, and it’s in favor of the team willing to take some action: buyers.

“Perhaps surprisingly, data suggests that many shoppers are still finding success in this challenging market, with the homeownership rate notching its highest fourth-quarter reading in over a decade of 65.9%,” says Realtor.com® Economist Jiayi Xu in her analysis of housing data for the week ending Feb. 18.

We’ll drill down into what the latest real estate statistics mean for homebuyers and sellers in this latest installment of “How’s the Housing Market This Week?”