Boston Condos for Sale and Apartments for Rent
Boston real estate trends 2022
If only we could foretell the future, we’d have bought Apple stock at the start of the pandemic.
While we can’t look forward with that degree of certainty, real estate experts and industry observers at the recent National Association of Real Estate Editors conference about what real estate trends might take over the headlines in 2022.
If you’re thinking about buying, selling or investing in residential real estate this year, keep these trends in mind:
Trend 1: Interest rates are rising for Boston condo
Since the Great Recession, mortgage industry observers and economists have annually foretold the rising of interest rates. In 2010, 30-year mortgage interest rates were around 4.69 percent but fell to the mid-3 percent range by 2012, according to Rocket Mortgage, and mostly stayed there. At the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, mortgage rates briefly hit 5.34 percent.
They quickly declined, and in January 2020, mortgage rates were back at around 3.7 percent. And then the novel coronavirus hit, the Federal Reserve Bank lowered the federal funds rate to between 0 and 0.25 percent, and mortgage interest rates dropped below 3 percent.https://cbc18e50993539f5e6a93cb514b973ca.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
What happens now? Lawrence Yun, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, and Mike Fratantoni, the chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association, agree that interest rates will rise. And Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell’s pronouncement that the Federal Reserve will look to raise the federal funds rate three times in 2022, while phasing out its bond-buying program, makes it likely that mortgage rates will rise.
If omicron (and future coronavirus variants) does not require more federal intervention, Yun expects to see 30-year mortgage interest rates of 3.5 percent in 2022. In the meantime, lenders will be laying off more loan officers and other staffers as refinancings dwindle. They’re hoping the purchase mortgage market stays red hot.
Trend 2: Millennial and Gen Z home buyers may find buying is unaffordable.
If interest rates rise much, millennials and Gen Z home buyers will find it increasingly unaffordable to purchase first homes. And millennials account for the majority of home buyers at the moment.
U.S. home values appreciated at an annual rate of 18 percent in October, according to CoreLogic, which was the highest level recorded in the 45-year history of the index. If you were looking to buy a single-family house, those appreciated at a rate of 19.5 percent, another record high.
That sort of growth, coming on the back of several years of double-digit price appreciation, is unsustainable. Since home prices are closely tied to income, something has to change: Either people will have to earn more money, interest rates will have to stay low, or home prices will have to come down to get everything back in balance.
In the meantime, the United States is about 5.24 million homes short (rentals, townhouses, condos and single-family detached houses), and builders are focusing on higher-end developments. After all, if you’ll get the same profit out of a million-dollar house as in building three or four $250,000 homes, which would you choose?
Source: Washington Post
