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The housing market has continued to see weakness amid high mortgage rates, affordability, and supply issues. In this episode of Stocks In Translation, Yahoo Finance senior reporter Alexandra Canal, along with Yahoo Finance producer Sydnee Fried, sits down with Morgan Stanley US Housing strategist James Egan to discuss the state of the housing market.
"One of the words that's been overused for the housing industry over the course of the past two years has been unprecedented," Egan explains, "but in a lot of instances, a lot of the key variables that we use to think about where home prices are going or where sales volumes are going, those inputs are either at levels we've never seen before, or they're levels that we haven't seen in decades. We use the term locked in and priced out. So much of the housing market depends right now on affordability and supply and kind of the intersection of those two variables."
They discuss the term "locked in and priced out." The lock-in effect occurs when homeowners do not want to sell their homes because the interest rate they received when they purchased the home is less than the current interest rate.
"The lock-in effect... [has] played a big role in keeping prices as elevated as they are," Egan notes. "The reason that home prices have been as high as they are is because people are just unwilling to sell their home at the lower prices that affordability would say right now. If we start to get more people listing their homes for sale for any number of reasons, that's going to unlock the existing home sales market, but could also start to bring down home prices."
Egan talks about what could happen to the housing market if the US economy sees a hard-landing scenario, underlining the significance of the Federal Reserve's own interest rate policies on the housing market.
"From a hard landing perspective, I would expect as rates come down, I do think you're going to see more inventory... In both the soft and hard landing, inventory starts to pick up. In a hard landing, there just isn't the same demand response... We think that home price growth will slow as that supply comes on, but it's still growth," Egan says.
Egan adds that mortgage rates "have to move a lot more significantly from six and a half percent, six and quarter where they are now, in our mind, to really kind of unstick the housing market."
Twice a week, Stocks In Translation cuts through the market mayhem, noisy numbers and hyperbole to give you the information you need to make the right trade for your portfolio. You can find more episodes on our video hub or watch on your preferred streaming service.
This post was written by Mariela Rosales.