Want to Buy a Home? Now May Be the Time

If you tried to buy a house during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, you probably encountered quite a few substantial obstacles along the road to home ownership. Or maybe you saw the state of the housing market and made the decision to postpone your home hunt until conditions improved.

 

Well, according to many realtors and financial experts, that time may have finally come. And, in light of the rising number of residential home transactions, American consumers tend to agree.

 

Although the housing market continues to shift and adjust, this acceptable amount of volatility may present homebuyers with opportunities that a stagnant market simply wouldn’t. After years of extreme market scarcity, the sheer number of houses for sale has risen dramatically as the US and the rest of the world continues its “return to normal” in the wake of the pandemic economic shutdown.

 

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged through 2021 and into 2022, many people wanted to purchase homes of their own, but few people decided to put their homes up for sale. In other words, there was a significant demand for homes in the face of a limited supply.

 

You don’t need to hold a PhD in economics to know what happened next. The low inventory of homes created a seller’s market across the United States that made things tremendously difficult for buyers. As buyers nationwide engaged in intense bidding wars, the average price of a home skyrocketed dramatically.

 

In recent months, this trend has began to reverse as more and more homes are finding their way to the market. According to the National Association of Realtors the number of preowned residential properties rose to 1.26 million by the beginning of summer 2022.

 

As homes continue to flood into the market, the cost of the average home is finally stabilizing in many areas. Therefore, an offer on a home within your budgetary constrictions is far more likely to be accepted.

 

Because they make home loans considerably more expensive, high mortgage interest rates can have a disastrous effect on homebuying power and exclude many from even pursuing homeownership. When mortgage rates began climbing in January of 2022, they kept many people out of the housing market even though the numbers of available homes were on the rise. According to by Zillow, this increase in mortgage rates continued through the beginning of July, rising a total of roughly 2.5 percentage points to hit a 30-year fixed rate average of about 5.6 percent.

 

However, July proved to be a turning point in this escalation. Over just a few days at the end of the month, mortgage rates fell nearly half a percentage point in an adjustment that Mortgage News Daily’s Matthew Graham called “an exceptionally fast drop!” This downturn in mortgage rates has allowed more people to take advantage of the growing inventory of homes on the market.

 

Beyond the lower market prices of homes and the lower interest rates of mortgages, other financial factors are making homeownership quite attractive at the moment. For example, a recent regulatory change to the US credit scoring process gave millions of American consumers an additional 22 points on their credit scores. For some, this will make all the difference when it comes to pursuing a home of their own.

 

The rapid rise in average rent is another phenomenon that is driving interest in homeownership. Rent has increased substantially over the past several years, and most experts predict that rents will inflate even more sharply into 2023. No matter what the cause, more than two-thirds of today’s renters hope to buy a home when their lease ends according to the National Housing Survey by Fannie Mae.

 

For all of these reasons and more, housing sector experts such as those at Kim and Lin Logan Real Estate feel that the summer of 2022 is a good time to buy a home. To learn more about the housing market with a specific focus on the communities of Lake Oconee and Lake Sinclair in Georgia, contact a skilled and knowledgeable real estate agency representative today.