Announcer:
4 Your Money is brought to you by NelsonCorp Wealth Management.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
It’s now time for 4 Your Money. We’re joined by James Nelson, financial planner at NelsonCorp Wealth Management. Welcome back James.
James Nelson:
Thanks Brandy.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
So housing activity seems to be cooling off again this year, what are you seeing in the numbers?
James Nelson:
Yeah, one of the biggest shifts right now is the imbalance between buyers and sellers in the housing market, and we’ve got a chart here that illustrates this. The chart tracks the number of active home buyers and sellers in the United States going back to 2013. So the blue line here shows the buyers and the red line is the sellers, and there’s this big divergence here in the last year where we’ve seen those lines separate. The latest data shows roughly 500,000 more sellers than buyers right now, and that’s the largest gap Redfin has ever recorded. And this is a total flip, this dynamic is totally different than what we saw during the pandemic where we had a huge shortage in inventory and a huge number of people looking. So it’s really put some downward pressure on housing prices recently.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
Okay, so what’s driving the shift and what does it mean for the housing outlook?
James Nelson:
So mortgage rates is the first one, I mean 7% mortgage rates tends to take some people out of the mix. Despite that, homeowners are still being forced to sell, whether they have a job change, layoffs, just normal life events, which has created a bigger supply in housing right now, and what we’re left with is some piling up as far as listings in certain markets. The good news is for that patient buyer out there, you’re going to have a few more options here, maybe not as much competition as what you’ve seen in the past, and maybe a little bit of easing as far as the pricing goes.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
All right, James, as always, thanks for joining us today.
James Nelson:
Thank you, Brandy.
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