Source: Yahoo! News —
William Raveis Mortgage Regional Vice President Melissa Cohn joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss housing affordability, consumers drawing down their savings, and the outlook for the housing market.
Video Transcript
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BRAD SMITH: US pending home sales fell more than expected during the month of November, with contract signings declining in all four major US regions, according to the latest data from the National Association of Realtors. The group noting that there are about two months of lag time between the mortgage rates and home sales. With mortgage rates falling throughout December, home buying activity should inevitably rebound in the coming months and help economic growth.
Joining us now is Melissa Cohn, William Raveis Mortgage Regional Vice President. Great to have you here with us today. Help us make sense of where we find ourselves right now because as I’m looking through some of the data that even had come out from Redfin and how they were classifying what we’ve watched over the course of this year, one thing that they did note within that was that, even with the activity that we’ve seen over the course of this year, there’s still, going into next year, so much concern around where home price growth will continue to slow and where we’ll actually see some reprieve as well.
MELISSA COHN: Well, it’s a combination of where mortgage rates are versus where real estate prices are. I think part of the problem that we’ve had in the real estate market is that home prices haven’t really softened that much. And mortgage rates have continued to climb. Mortgage rates are more than double where they were at the beginning of this year.
And so the consumer’s been given sort of no benefit, either with a lower price or a lower mortgage payment. And I think unfortunately, we’re probably going to see some of the same again for the next few months until the Fed finally ends its rate hiking cycle.
JULIE HYMAN: So Melissa, if you had to predict, a year from now, where rates would be, do you think we’re pretty much in the same boat?
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