Mortgage rates stuck in a rut as economy turns gloomy. What's next for the housing market?
Rates for home loans ticked up fractionally but stayed in the same narrow range they’ve been in for several months.
In the week ending March 20, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 6.67%, Freddie Mac announced Thursday. That’s only slightly up from 6.65% last week, but not low enough to spark major moves in the mortgage market: applications for home loans were down 6.2%, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.
Those figures don’t include fees or points, and rates in some parts of the country may be higher or lower than the national average.
If mortgage rates aren’t making much headway one way or the other this year, neither is the housing market itself. Sales of previously-owned homes jumped in February, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday, after falling in January.
When it comes to new housing stock, economic indicators are also mixed. Builders broke ground on more new homes than expected in February, the Commerce Department reported earlier this week. The pace set in February was a 12-month high, and may have been an attempt to get ahead of tariffs.
Indeed, a measure of homebuilder sentiment fell to a seven-month low in March.
Many Americans considering buying a home have waited for years for rates to stabilize or inventory to become available. But analysts are increasingly concerned that deteriorating economic conditions will simply sideline many would-be buyers.
“Consumer worries about losing their jobs are at levels normally seen during recessions,” wrote Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok in a note out Sunday. “A record-high share of consumers think business conditions are worsening,” Slok added. “The bottom line is that consumer sentiment is deteriorating at an alarming rate.”
Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, echoed that view in a note sent after the existing-home sales data. “A recent downtick in mortgage rates may lend some support to home sales in the months ahead, but that could be countered by growing uncertainty on the part of households about the economy,” she wrote. “We look for sales to move sideways in 2025.”
In March, homebuilders reported that the number of prospective buyers taking tours was at its lowest in 15 months.
Some observers believe only outside-the-box thinking will solve the affordability crisis in housing. As previously reported, one woman in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, is building tiny homes in a factory to help mitigate rising costs and lack of inventory.