Buying a house is harder than it’s ever been — and meaningfully lower mortgage rates seem forever in the future.out of his longtime home in Charleston, South Carolina. The kids are grown and gone, and downsizing is appealing. But Kent, a realtor, is locked into what he calls “golden handcuffs” – an enviable interest rate of 2.35% on his 15-year mortgage. If he were to sell, he’d have to buy somewhere else, and his rate would climb into the range of 7%. He’s not going anywhere.
Nearly eight in ten Americans said 2023 was a bad time to buy a house, the highest number since Gallup started posingin the 1970s. And more than half of Americans say housing affordability will affect how they vote, according to aof 3,000 homeowners and renters for real estate data provider Redfin. That’s bad news for Biden. Just 38% of the homes sold in the last half of 2023 were within the financial reach of a family earning the U.S.
Bozeman home prices were boosted by a stream of out-of-state buyers fleeing Covid, and even today about half the homes are purchased with cash, higher than the one-third of buyers nationally. That means rates shouldn’t matter to them. But they do, says Everdawn Charles, an agent with Keller Williams Montana Realty and a Montana native. “There are a lot of buyers sitting on the sidelines,” she says.
The result is that it’s a little bit crazy in a lot of high-population areas, not just in small outposts for the wealthy like Jackson Hole. In Phoenix, prices for single-family homesjust 6% from 2019 to 2022. In Long Island, New York, the median home price last month was $645,000, upfrom February of last year, according to Redfin. The number of homes on the market in the Dallas-Fort Worth area hassays the view for the rest of this year is a mixed bag. “Inventory will remain thin,” she says.