They were fed up with Seattle’s home bidding wars. They were only in their late 20s but had already lost two battles and were ready to renew with their landlord. Then, in May, their agent called.
Suddenly, Redfin’s Shoshana Godwin told the couple, sellers were getting jumpy, even here in the hottest of markets. Homes that should have vanished in days were sitting on the market for weeks. There was a three-bedroom fixer-upper just north of the city going for $550,000, down from more than $600,000. They made the leap in early June and had closed by the end of the month, for list price.
The U.S. housing market – particularly in cutthroat areas like Seattle, Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas – appears to be headed for the broadest slowdown in years. Buyers are getting squeezed by rising mortgage rates and by prices climbing about twice as fast as incomes, and there’s only so far they can stretch.
“This could be the very beginning of a turning point,” said Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is famed for warning of the dot-com and housing bubbles, in an interview. He stressed that he isn’t ready to make that call yet.
We haven’t even recovered in most of the US from last downturn inflation adjusted. Shiller is a grim reaper in a shitty housing market. New Haven will never have a real estate boom.
Looking at the inventory graph, isn’t 2013 / 2014 were also hot market (at least that’s what I felt when I bought it) so even inventory goes up to that level, it will still be hot? Maybe not red hot, but still seller’s market.
I am feeling good buying next year instead of this year, or even maybe the year after next year. Let me roll my money in the stock market for a bit longer…
