If you’re looking to buy a home in the US (or in any advanced economy, for that matter), there’s bad news: Property’s expensive as hell.
And if you’re under, say, 40, financing costs probably seem draconian, even as a longer lookback shows mortgage rates really aren’t anomalous.
Against that all too familiar backdrop, US home prices posted their largest YoY gain of 2023 in November, lagged data released on Tuesday showed.
The 5.4% increase on the Case-Shiller 20-City gauge counted as the fifth straight 12-month gain.
The national index, which hit a series of new records beginning over the summer, rose 5.1% from the same month a year ago, but do note: The NSA version fell on a MoM basis.
“US home prices edged downward from their all-time high in November,” Brian Luke, Head of Commodities, Real & Digital Assets at S&P Dow Jones remarked. “The streak of nine monthly gains ended, setting the index back to levels last seen over the summer months.”
I’m not sure how meaningful that is, but S&P thought it was worth a mention, so who am I to argue?
Meanwhile, prices on the FHFA gauge rose 6.6% YoY, “slightly above the historical average,” as Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist in FHFA’s research division, put it Tuesday, adding that every census division enjoyed (or not, depending on whether you’re a homeowner or a would-be buyer) price appreciation over the last 12 months.
There’s nothing especially interesting here. This is just an obligatory update. It doesn’t make for the most exciting reading, but if you’re going to cover housing wall-to-wall (there’s a bad pun for you), then you can’t exactly omit the monthly Case-Shiller and FHFA price data.
On an upbeat note, Redfin calculations documented by Dana Anderson earlier this week suggested a buyer on a $3,000 monthly housing budget (which is to say a reasonably well-off, but hardly affluent buyer) gained $40,000 in purchasing power since late October, when mortgage rates peaked for the cycle.
Now, such a person could afford a $453,000 home, a little nicer than average. Anderson offered some additional context. If a buyer is content with the median home in America (which’ll run you around $363,000), that buyer would pay around $2,545 a month, a savings of $200 (or one grocery trip) versus October.
