Fisher says his recent buyers fall into three camps. At either end are first-time buyers who have never had a 3 percent loan, and older buyers who are paying cash. Neither is much bothered by rates around 6 percent, he said. In the middle are move-up buyers who initially worried about rates more. But they are making work-arounds like Neuder's to get what they want, Fisher said.
Add in wage growth — wages rose about 5 percent last year, according to data from Zillow — and the effective price of housing has come down sharply in some places, while remaining well above pre-Covid levels, Zillow chief economist Skylar Olsen said. By the NAR's numbers, affordability is now poor in metro Tampa, with the median buyer only earning 80 percent of what's needed to buy the median home. But Tampa is close enough to equilibrium that Clarke doesn't see anything coming like 2008-2011, when the average Tampa house lost half of its value.The math on mortgage rates and wage growth
Nationally, to get back to the average affordability since 1980, meaning median houses are about 20 percent cheaper than the median family can afford, mortgage rates would have to come down to about 4.6 percent, while wages rise 4% and prices stayed stable, the NAR's Evangelou said. Wage growth has recently cooled a little, but remains above 4% — in the recent nonfarm payrolls report, wages were up 4.4% from a year ago, though a bit below the December gain of 4.6%.
Obama did this 😂