Single-Family Housing Market Cools As Interest Rates Increase

CHARLOTTE, NC—The housing market in the US has surged within the last couple of years with 2016 existing home sales being the strongest they’ve been since 2006. Ten years after experiencing the worst housing crisis in US history, the market has been in a consistent upswing.

Now, though, the single-family housing market is slowly transitioning.

“The market is currently going through a cooling down shift,” says Greg Rand, CEO of OwnAmerica, an online exchange for rental home portfolios. “This cooling down shift is occurring in a very appropriate manner because the prices were too high for too long. Now the prices are coming down because if consumers don’t buy, sellers naturally have to lower their prices.”

“The market isn’t going negative, it is simply flattening out and will go back up at a slower rate,” Rand tells GlobeSt.com. “Increased interest rates automatically have a cooling effect on the market.”

With the Fed’s recent meeting and interest rates steadily increasing, consumers and businesses will obviously strategize on how to successfully access credit to make purchases and map out their finances.

Buyers still has to have “pretty good credit to get good rates,” says Rand. “Banks haven’t gotten lenient with their lending guidelines which is good. We don’t want to relax those guidelines as they would later result in a higher level of foreclosures.”

Even with the recent mid-term elections changing the political landscape, the single-family housing market will remain stable and has a sunny forecast, Rand predicts. Housing demand is strong but not unrealistic. Consumers will buy a house but not pay more than its worth.

Buyers are “resilient and will pay attention to their personal life changes and not necessarily to Wall Street or the headlines. If a family or an individual decides to purchase a house, interest rates may change their price point but not change their decision to buy. They will get that home,” says Rand.