Here’s what you could know concerning the housing market

In anticipation of the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate cut in years, mortgage rates plummeted this summer, especially in August. Then the Fed actually cut its key interest rate by half a point last week, and mortgage rates fell a bit more. The latest reading showed the weekly average 30-year fixed mortgage rate came in at 6.08% today. (Daily mortgage rates are higher, at 6.21%).

But let’s get back to August. The hope was that a drop in mortgage rates would bring some heat to our chilly housing scene. Has it? Apart from a wave of refinancing, not so much. 

Pending home sales, which only mean a seller has accepted an offer but serve as a barometer for where things are headed, rose in August from the prior month by 0.6%, according to data out today. They fell year over year, of course. “A slight upward turn reflects a modest improvement in housing affordability, primarily because mortgage rates descended to 6.5% in August,” the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist, Lawrence Yun, said in the release. “However, contract signings remain near cyclical lows even as home prices keep marching to new record highs.” (We’ll get to that later).

In the same vein, data out last week showed existing home sales dropped 2.5% in August from a month earlier and 4.2% from a year ago. It seems lower mortgage rates didn’t matter too much to would-be buyers and sellers. In the release, Yun said: “Home sales were disappointing again in August, but the recent development of lower mortgage rates coupled with increasing inventory is a powerful combination that will provide the environment for sales to move higher in future months.” 

Then there’s new home sales. The new home market has been a lone bright spot in an otherwise miserable housing market because homebuilders can offer incentives to bring buyers back; think mortgage rate buydowns. But there’s more to it. Because mortgage rates soared so rapidly from pandemic lows, it triggered a lock-in effect and people stopped selling homes. It’s partly why we’ve seen existing home sales nosedive. This has provided builders with an opportunity though. There’s a lack of existing homes for sale and people need homes, so builders build them. And while new home sales actually fell 4.7% in August from a month ago, they rose 9.8% from last year, data released Wednesday showed. 

Following the news, a Zillow senior economist pointed to the latest survey from National Association of Home Builders, which “showed an increase in builder confidence, coupled with a decline in the share of builders cutting their prices or offering incentives,” he wrote, signaling the monthly drop in new home sales could probably be short-lived.

Now to the thing we all care about: home prices. There isn’t a sole measurement for home prices, so let’s run through what we have. On Tuesday, we learned home prices as measured by Case-Shiller rose 5% in July, year over year. That’s another all-time high for home prices, but at a slower-paced increase (and don’t forget mortgage rates were higher in July than August). Not to mention, in both new home and existing home data, there are price updates. The median existing home sales price rose 3.1% from a year ago to $416,700 in August. On the other hand, the median sales price of new houses was $420,600, a 4.6% drop from a year ago. 

All this data is based on activity a month prior to the Fed cut. We know lower mortgage rates are coming, but as we’ve seen they haven’t really dropped much since the actual cut because a lot of what happened was already priced in. Still, rates are lower this month than last, falling to their lowest level in two years today. We’ll see if that changes anything for September sales data, but it might be a little while longer.