The U.S. Housing Market Slowdown Podcast Por arte de portada

The U.S. Housing Market Slowdown

The U.S. Housing Market Slowdown

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 The U.S. housing market appears to be stuck. Our co-heads of Securitized Product research, Jay Bacow and James Egan, explain how supply and demand, as well as mortgage rates, play a role in the cooling market.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----James Egan: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jim Egan, co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley.Jay Bacow: And I'm Jay Bacow, the other co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley. And after getting through last week's blistering hot temperatures, today we're going to talk about what may be a cooling housing market. It's Monday, June 30th at 2:30pm in New York. Now, Jim, home prices. We just got another index. They set another record high, but the pace of growth – the acceleration as a physicist in me wants to say – appears to be slowing. What's going on here?James Egan: The pace of home price growth reported this month was 2.7 percent. That is the lowest that it's been since August of 2023. And in our view, the reason's pretty simple. Supply is increasing, while demand has stalled.Jay Bacow: But Jim, this was a report for the spring selling season. I know we got it in June, but this is supposed to be the busiest time of the year. People are happy to go around. They're looking at moving over the summer when the kids aren't in school. We should be expecting the supply to increase. Are you saying that it's happening more than it's anticipated?James Egan: That is what we're saying. Now, we should be expecting inventories today to be higher than they were in, call it January or February. That's exactly the seasonality that you're referring to. But it's the year-over-year growth we're paying attention to here. Homes listed for sale are up year-over-year, 18 months in a row. And that pace, it's been accelerating. Over the past 40 years, the pace of growth from this past month was only eclipsed one time, the Great Financial Crisis.Jay Bacow: [sighs] I always get a little worried when the housing analyst brings up the Great Financial Crisis. Are you saying that this time the demand isn't responding?James Egan: That is what we're saying. So, through the first five months of this year, existing home sales are only down about 2 percent versus the first five months of 2024. So they've basically kind of plateaued at these levels. But that also means that we're seeing the fewest number of transactions through May in a calendar year since 2009. And that combination of easing inventory and lackluster demand, it's pushed months of supply back to levels that we haven't seen since the beginning of this pandemic. Call it the fourth quarter of 2019, first quarter of 2020, right before inventory has really plummeted to historic lows.Jay Bacow: All right, so 2009, another financial crisis reference. But you're also – you're speaking around a national level, and as a housing analyst, I feel like you haven't really spoken about the three most important factors when we think about things which are: Location. Location. And location.James Egan: Absolutely. And the deceleration that we're seeing in home price growth – and I would point out it is still growth – has been pervasive across the country. Year-over-year, HPA is now decelerating in 100 percent of the top 100 MSAs, for which we have data. In fact, a full quarter of them, 25 percent of these cities are now actually seeing prices decline on a year-over-year basis. And that's up from just 5 percent with declining home prices one year ago.Jay Bacow: As a homeowner, I do like the home price growth. And is it the same story when you look more narrowly around supply and demand?James Egan: So, there might be some geographical nuances, but we do think that it largely boils down to that. Local inventory growth has been a very good indicator of weaker home price performance, particularly the level of for-sale inventory today versus that fourth quarter of 2019. If we look at it on a geographic basis, of 14 MSAs that have the highest level of inventory today compared to 2019, 11 of them are in either Florida or Texas. On the other end of the spectrum, the cities where inventory remains furthest away from where it was four and a half years ago, they're in the Northeast, they're in the Midwest.Jay Bacow: As somebody who lives in the Northeast, I'd like to hear that again. But you're also; you're quoting existing prices, which that's been the outperformer in the housing market. Right?James Egan: Exactly. New home prices have actually been decreasing year-over-year for the past year and a half at this point. It's actually brought the basis between new home prices, which tend to trade at a little bit of a premium to existing sales; it's brought that basis to its tightest level that we've seen in at least 30 years. And that's before we take into account the fact that home builders have been buying down some of these mortgage rates. But Jay, you've recently done ...
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