Foreign buyers continued to pull back for the second year, purchasing $74 billion of U.S. existing homes from April 2019–March 2020, a 5% decrease from the prior 12-month period.
Interest rates dipped 11 basis points to 2.88% on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, continuing to hover at record-low levels. The rates may fall further over the next few weeks since the 10-year Treasury yields, off of which the government-backed mortgages are priced, retreated ever so slightly in past weeks.
REALTORS® expect to have more sales transactions in residential and industrial land sales in the third quarter.
The U.S. Census Bureau released its second-quarter GDP estimates and reported that personal consumption spending fell by nearly 35% on a seasonally adjusted annual rate.
Layoffs are still happening with 1.4 million new filers for unemployment insurance, a slight increase of 12,000 from the prior week.
The housing market is hot because of lower mortgage rates, but the luxury market may remain soft due to jumbo loan issues.
As expected, economic activity collapsed in the second quarter due to the total virus-lockdown in April and only partial re-openings in May. The GDP contraction of 33% on an annualized basis is the steepest ever experienced in the U.S.
According to the Census Bureau's Residential Vacancies and Homeownership report for Q2 2020, the homeownership rate increased by nearly 4 percentage points, to 67.9%.
NAR has analyzed the ability of mortgage holders to meet their mortgage payments by state, age group, and income.
As jobs recover, the fraction of purchase contract terminations has started to decline again.
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