Real Estate Market Update: Mortgage Interest Rates and Home Sale Statistics

Today I am going to share with you a Real Estate Market Update for August 2013. We have a lot of things happening in the real estate industry. If you own a home or plan to own a home, please listen to this short video filled with graphs and statistics concerning the future mortgage interest rates, trends happening right now with house prices, and what you should expect to happen over the next couple months.

As you can imagine, being an expert in this New World of Real Estate, I want to make sure everyone understands what’s happening in the real estate market right now before you make a decision to buy or sell a home.

Let’s get started with what is happening with sales right now. The market is very strong. In January we were at 4.2 months of inventory, now we are at 5 months of inventory. As prices rise people with negative equity now can sell,  hence more homes are coming on the market. Looking at the pending homes graph, pending sales are skyrocketing.

More important than that is the latest projections from NAR over the next 6 quarters, sales are projected to continue on almost a straight line up. Here are Cardano Realtors our goal is to educate people to making the right decisions.

Watch the video to view various graphs that tell the story of what is occurring in the real estate industry.

Median days on the market graph. The graph shows that the days on the market is decreasing. So if your home not sold in the last 60 days on the market, bottom line, it is not priced right.

Case Shiller Report: Home Prices Over the Last 12 Months. This graph shows that yes prices are up from last year. However, in almost every city, they are down pretty dramatically from where the peak was in 2006. In 2006, home prices swung too high. Prices are now recovering, to where they should be and nowhere near where they were in 2006.

Mortgage Rates: Where are the mortgage rates headed?  No one expected interest rates to go up this past month, they went up almost 1 percent. This took everyone by surprise. Interesting enough, 4 major institutions projected the beginning of June this year that the interest rates in 3rd quarter 2014 would be 4.6 to 4.8%. . We hit those rates last month.  No one saw that spike coming.

Rates from January 2012 to Today. Rates were dropping for a good portion all the way to the beginning of this year, then they went up a little bit and came back down again. Then over the last 6 weeks they just skyrocketed.

Rate Change Effect on Monthly Mortgage Payment. Well how does that impact someone buying a $200,000 house. The cost of waiting a year is just over $200 a month. Over 12 months $2,600 a year and over a 30 year mortgage almost $78,000. So if you are looking for a home, it may be a good time to capture these low rates before they go up again.  Home Sellers it is a great time to sell this fall, you have a captive audience and if you are priced right you will find your home selling in less than 60 days. Our average here at Cardano Realtors is 26 days. We find our homes sell for half the time as the average and people who go to our seminars sell 3 times faster than home sellers who did not go to a seminar.

Distressed Sales Graph. Let’s talk about Distressed sales, good for us they are at 18%, the lowest they have been in years.  We are eating through that inventory right now. We are getting back to more normalized numbers, it is still high but nowhere near where it was a couple years ago.

Home Prices Appreciation Since June 2012. This graph from S&P Cash Shiller shows home prices going up every month sign June of last year. Let’s see what happens over the next couple months. If the amount of appreciate slows down that might be something we want to keep our eye on.

Price increases in 20 Metropolitan Areas. Philadelphia is not on this graph, however, I have been told we are around 5%. One thing I know about our area, our prices never get too too high or get too too low, we do not get the large fluctuation in prices as California, Arizona, etc.

That is this month's report, this is Diane Cardano from Cardano Real Estate Experts. We will see you next month with more statistics about the current real estate market.