Source: Fortune —
Back in March, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas put the real estate industry on high alert when they published a paper titled “Real-time market monitoring finds signs of brewing U.S. housing bubble.” It’s one thing for Redditors on the r/REBubble board to pontificate about housing bubble theories. But when a Federal Reserve bank engages in bubble talk, that’s alarming.
That Dallas Fed paper found that U.S. home prices are once again becoming detached from underlying economic fundamentals. However, if a housing correction comes, they wrote, it’s unlikely to cause a 2008-style housing crash. Homeowners are less debt-burdened this time around. Not to mention, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act eliminated many of the financial products that underpinned the credit-fueled bubble of the 2000s.
Fast-forward to today, and that Dallas Fed report—which used data from the fourth quarter of 2021—is already outdated. The first three months of 2022 was arguably the hottest quarter ever recorded in housing. On Tuesday, we learned the year-over-year home price growth rate hit an all-time of 20.6% between March 2021 and March 2022. While things in April and May finally began to cool down, home prices still remain well above levels hit in the final months of last year.
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