Washington (awp / dpa) – US second-hand housing prices hit an all-time high in March, due to the lack of available properties on the market amid strong demand, the National Federation of Realtors said Thursday. Americans (NAR).
The median price of older homes hit an all-time high of $ 329,100, up 17.2% from March 2020.
Due to the insufficient number of houses and apartments available on the market, home resales fell again in March, for the second month in a row, falling 3.7% from February.
These are 6.01 million homes that changed owners last month, less than the 6.15 million expected by analysts.
Already in February, sales of second-hand homes had plunged 6.6% compared to January.
“Consumers are facing much higher prices, rising mortgage rates,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the NAR, said in the statement.
However, demand remains strong and “buyers are still very active in the market,” he said, stressing that “March sales would have been much higher if there had been more goods for sale”.
“The low number of goods available drives up prices and makes purchasing less affordable, which remains a major concern and should continue to penalize” the market, explains Rubeela Farooqi, economist for HFE.
The real estate market has been doing particularly well since the start of the crisis, thanks to exceptionally low interest rates and the deployment of teleworking, which has allowed many families to move away from city centers to have more space.
However, rates had risen a little at the start of the year, before falling again at the beginning of April, according to data published by Freddie Mac, a semi-public mortgage refinancing body, which buys mortgage loans from banks, securitizes them and guarantees.
This further decline in home sales is linked “to rising mortgage rates and tighter lending conditions,” commented economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.
He also sees “perhaps, the decline in fear of Covid” thanks to the current vaccination campaign, which “makes leaving for the suburbs less attractive”.
afp / rp
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