Mortgage Rates Hit 7.23%, Highest Since 2001 | Hacker News Reader

Mortgage Rates Hit 7.23%, Highest Since 2001

wsj.com

24 pointsmfiguiere55 comments

The housing market appears crushed. Sales are so low. It may take only a minor jump in unemployment for housing prices to slide.

You should do a cost comparison between buying a house between 2008-2020 and now. Selling your house would lead to a massive increase in living expenses. It would need to be truly desperate.

I continue to be surprised by the limited listings. But people don't want to sell, and why would they sell out of their 3% mortgage now?

Correct, the inventory is terrible. Yet, I am "desperate", and we're looking at houses and actively in talks with mortgage officers.

I also feel housing prices won't come down in the areas I'm looking at. I feel they will only go up, because employment in this area (Pacific NW) is fairly solid (T-mobile just dropped some news today).

So regardless of interest rates, If I can survive 2 years with a high mortgage, in hopes the price value of the house will be the lowest it will ever get.

Or live outside the big cities and enjoy reasonable prices :)

But I don't want to live TOO far out, should anything happen to my current job. I don't feel that the remote-work revolution has taken hold.

There are many people like you, and many more who would like to buy but are priced out entirely with current prices / rates. My hypothesis is that the forces driving low inventory are also creating massive demand to build up that will take years or even a decade to unwind.

Yet prices continue to increase. Hopefully, this is how prices decrease and houses become primarily for living instead of investing.

Some of the unemployment shift is likely to come from the real estate market (banks, brokers, realtors); with as many closings as happened during the boom times of free money, we should expect normal times to require less staff and be less profitable.

We’re looking and can’t find something that lasts more than two weeks. It’s going to take something drastic to drop those prices since they’re still going up and hopefully it’s before I end up buying a new place.

Totally depends on your market. I have plenty of buyers and sellers where I work. Spoke to a designated broker this morning in the largest urban market in my state who said overall his office is down significantly, but his top producers are all doing fine still. Holding on to that low rate is stopping some sellers, but sooner or later life events catch up with everyone.

Whenever people say "highest since xxxx" i sometimes chuckle. If it hits 10% maybe highest since 1881? 100%? Highest since Kneecapsimus would walk around breaking kneecaps for those who didn't pay back in the Roman days?

I think it's actually a great stat - people who are 40 or under, this is the highest rate it's been the entire time they have been adults. There are 2+ generations seeing the highest rates in their adult life - that's interesting context.

(US 30 year mortgage rates did hit 17% in 1981 - so we don't have to go quite as far back as ancient Rome :) )

https://archive.is/gJOWu

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