Prospective home buyers leave a property for sale during an Open House in a neighborhood in Clarksburg, Maryland on September 3, 2023.
Roberto Schmidt | AFP | Getty Images
It’s no secret that the housing market looks far different than it did a few years ago.
While surging mortgage rates and housing prices have taken away consumers’ purchasing power, low supply has kept the market competitive. As a result, affordability has tumbled dramatically from the early days of the pandemic.
These six charts help explain what this unique moment looks like — and what it means for you:
The 30-year mortgage rate, a popular option for home buyers utilizing financing, is key to understanding the market. This rate is essentially the borrowing costs tied to purchasing a home with financing. A higher rate, in reality, results in more interest due on a home loan.
For the past several months, this rate has hovered around the 7% level. While it has cooled after touching 8% late last year, it’s still far higher the sub-3% rates consumers could lock in during the first years of the pandemic.
Housing prices are also central to the equation for everyday Americans decision how much, or if, they can afford to spend. The Case-Shiller national home price index, which is calculated by S&P Dow Jones Indices, has notched record highs this year.
High prices can elicit different feelings by group. For hopeful homeowners, it can raise red flags that they are planning to buy at the wrong time. But current owners can see reason to celebrate, as it likely means their own property’s value has risen.
With both mortgages and prices up, it’s not surprising that affordability is down compared with the early innings of the pandemic.
There’s a few different readings of affordability painting a similar picture. One from the National Association of Realtors found affordability tumbled more than 33% between 2021 and 2023 alone.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s gauge showed the economic feasibility of home ownership plummeted more than 36% when comparing April to the pandemic high seen in summer 2020.
Another way the Atlanta Fed tracks this is through the share of income needed by the typical American to afford the median home. Nationally, it last required 43% of their pay, well above the 30% marker considered the threshold for affordability. It has been considered unaffordable, or above 30%, since mid 2021.
The Atlanta Fed also breaks out what’s driving the current lack of affordability. While significant pay increases in recent years have helped line wallets, the bank found that the negative impact of higher rates and list prices have more than outweighed the benefits of a bigger paycheck.
While the current mortgage rates are high, a team at the Federal Housing Finance Agency found a very small proportion of borrowers are actually locked in at these lofty levels.
Just shy of 98% of mortgages were below the average rate seen in the fourth quarter of last year, the FHFA found. Nearly 69% had a rate that was a whopping 3 percentage points below that average.
There’s two major reasons for why such a small share are paying current rates. The most obvious is that the housing market got hot when rates were low, but cooled significantly in the current period of higher borrowing costs.
The other answer is the race to refinance when rates were below or near 3% early in the pandemic. That allowed people who were already homeowners to take advantage of these relatively low levels.
