After a long, hot summer that saw mortgage rates creep ever higher, October has brought an early winter for the housing market. Existing-home sales dropped a stunning 15% in September on a year-over-year basis to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.96 million transactions, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That’s the lowest figure in 13 years, since 2010, when the world economy, and particularly the U.S. housing market, were struggling to pull out of the Great Financial Crisis.
Contributing factors to the continuous decline in home transactions include surging mortgage rates (which just hit 8% this week—a record in the 21st century), low inventory levels, and home prices that refuse to stop rising. In other words, there aren’t enough homes to buy, money isn’t cheap anymore, and the ones for sale are too rich for most homebuyers’ blood.
