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AUGUST - REAL ESTATE NEWS: More Homes, Better Prices: A Buyer’s Summer

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If you’ve thought about buying a home in the past few years, you may have run into two frustrations: asking prices that kept climbing and too few homes to choose from. In many places, both sticking points are letting up this summer, with lower asking prices and more homes for sale. Let’s look at the trends, and what they mean for your search. Sellers Are Pricing To Attract Buyers According to Realtor.com , the national median asking price was $430,000 in June, nearly $11,000 under what it was the year before (see graph below) : That’s the eighth month in a row that the typical asking price has dipped below where they were the previous year, according to the same Realtor.com report. And while falling prices can sound worrying, this isn’t a sign of an impending crash. We’re talking about asking prices, not sold prices. This is a sign that today’s sellers are meeting the market where it is and pricing to draw buyers. And that’s actually something normal we’d expect from the market. As...
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Mortgages Rates Fall Again—and the Fed Could Push Them Even Lower

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Springtime Brooklyn Street and Houses


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Mortgage rates dropped to their lowest level since October 2016 due to weaker economic data over the past week.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 3.49% during the week ending Sept. 5, down 9 basis points from the previous week, Freddie Mac reported Thursday.


Rates for 30-year home loans have only increased nine times so far this year — otherwise, they have dropped or remained flat from week to week.
The 15-year fixed-rate mortgage moved down 6 basis points to an average of 3.00%, according to Freddie Mac. The 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage averaged 3.30%, falling 1 basis point.
Mortgage rates roughly track the direction of the 10-year Treasury note. The yield on the 10-year note has generally fallen since mid-August, though this week it began to show signs of a rebound amid growing optimism sparked by planned trade talks between the U.S. and China.
“Mortgage rates continued the summer swoon due to weaker economic data,” Freddie Mac wrote. “While economic growth is clearly slowing due to rising manufacturing and trade headwinds, economic fundamentals are still solid for U.S. consumers.”
‘Mortgage rates continued the summer swoon due to weaker economic data. While economic growth is clearly slowing due to rising manufacturing and trade headwinds, economic fundamentals are still solid for U.S. consumers.’

Freddie Mac
The Federal Reserve released its latest edition of the Beige Book, its periodic commentary on the state of the economy, on Wednesday. Although the Fed’s language painted a fairly rosy picture of the economy, most downside risks persist. As a result, many analysts expect the Fed to cut interest rates by 25 basis points when it meets later this month.
“If there were some sense among Fed staffers that the rate cut should be postponed, they certainly did not establish a defense of that position in this Beige Book,” Ward McCarthy and Thomas Simons, Jeffries’ chief financial economist and senior money market economist, wrote in a research note Wednesday.
St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard has gone further than some of his other colleagues, arguing that a 50-basis-point trimming may be what’s needed to keep the Fed ahead of the curve on international trade’s effect on the U.S. economy.
Moves by the Fed don’t directly trigger moves in the mortgage markets, since the Fed manipulates short-term interest rates and not long-term rates like those on mortgages.
However, the Fed’s signals are typically baked into mortgage rates in advance of an expected cut to short-term rates. Therefore, people looking to take out a new home loan can reasonably expect mortgage rates to move downward in the coming weeks as long as the Fed is expected to cut rates.
Original Article via Realtor.com

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