Brian Decker’s Housing Update: A Record 9% of U.S. Homes Are Worth At Least $1 Million

Every few weeks I curate an article to summarize exactly what is going on in the housing market. Talks between Russia and Ukraine have failed, making no progress, causing the stock market to sell off. The consumer price index was released at almost 8%, the highest reading in 40 years. However, if we included home price increases and true energy costs, this number would be at least 13% or more. However, the US government doesn't include gas prices in the inflation numbers since they have "no control" over them.

On a positive note, we received the Core Logic homeowner's equity report, which measures how much equity homeowners have gained over the last 12 months. This number showed almost 30%! This means the average person who bought a home on the west coast in January 2021 has increased their home value by nearly 30%. With these types of equity gains, it makes taking cash out of your home to pay off debt, buy an investment property or make home improvements a real possibility.

We will have a real housing inventory issue for years to come. As it stands, there are currently less than 500,000 homes for sale in the entire U.S. The amount of homes available for sale has decreased so dramatically that we only have about 1/3 of the inventory we had at the beginning of 2019. Think about that, if we had 3 homes for sale on a street of 20 homes, we now only have 1 home for sale!

There are 9,000,000 more Americans residing in the U.S between the ages of 27-35 than there were in 2008. This has led to a substantial increase in the number of people needing to buy a home, but we have an 80% reduction in the supply of homes for sale (compared to 2008). Even if we saw 50% of the people wanting to buy a home leave the market (by some miracle), we still have more than 2 buyers for every home listed for sale on the West Coast.

With home values at an all-time high, more people than ever are putting their home equity to work. Wanting to beat the fed rate hikes, homeowners are taking cash out for home improvements, paying off high-interest debt, to purchase investment properties or even short-term rentals.

Let me know your mortgage balance, your home value, and your goal of the refinance and we will send you an estimate with no commitment and no credit pull.

If you are still in the process of shopping for a potential new home here are the approximate mortgage rates this week!