05/11/2024
Home Ownership Still One of the Best Investments
Housing demand is sluggish due to elevated mortgage rates and affordability challenges, yet home values keep rising. There are three primary reasons:
1. There’s a shortage of homes for sale. Many homeowners are hesitant to put their houses on the market because they scored an ultra low mortgage rate in recent years, and selling would mean giving it up. Supply is even more constrained than demand, meaning buyers are competing for a limited pool of homes. That’s propping up values for both homes that are already for sale and those that could hit the market in the future.
2. Home values hit a low about a year ago. The total value of U.S. homes was nearing a trough at the end of 2022, which is part of the reason year-over-year growth at the end of 2023 was so large. It’s typical for home values to cool in the winter, but they experienced an abnormally large slowdown in 2022 as the shock of surging mortgage rates sent a freeze through the housing market.
3. More homes were built. While America is grappling with a housing shortage, it continues to build homes, which contributed to the gain in total home value last year. Redfin’s analysis includes roughly 96 million homes, up from 95 million as of December 2022—an increase that was fueled by new construction.
“America’s homeowners are sitting pretty. They’re holding a massive amount of housing wealth, despite lackluster demand from buyers, because home values skyrocketed during the pandemic and now a supply shortage is preventing those values from falling,” said Redfin Economics Research Lead Chen Zhao.