Priscilla Almodovar, the CEO of Fannie Mae (OTC: FNMA) has looked at the housing market and said she never saw anything like it.
In an interview with MarketWatch, pointed to home prices that are still at historic highs.
“It’s a highly unaffordable market right now,” she said. “We are monitoring and following all these trends, things that we’ve never seen before. You have home prices the highest we’ve seen in two decades.”
Almodovar predicted it was unlikely for mortgage rates of the pre-pandemic era, adding the 3% rate seen during the pandemic is something that “we probably will never see that again in our lifetime.”
Almodovar said that while an increase in housing supply is overdue, there were too many obstacles at local levels to creating new supply.
“It’s zoning. It’s not-in-my-backyard NIMBY-ism,” Almodovar said. “The No. 1 issue is the local. That’s where decisions really get made.”
For the time being, Almodovar acknowledged housing remains “one of the most important domestic policy issues that we have to tackle.”
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