Monthly Market Metrics | 12.2023
Thank you for tuning in to Tungol Mandap’s Monthly Report on rates and economic activity affecting your real estate market today. The Monthly Market Metrics is a new series that will explore the things happening around us that affect the economics of buying a home. Often, people miss opportunities in the real estate market because they are looking at the wrong aspect or they don’t see how valuable a compromise can be. Hopefully, this report will help you make some informed decisions about home-buying at the right time. Our contributing lending expert, Mark Thatcher of Fairway Independent Mortgage Corp., will break things down in ways that are easy to understand and hard to forget, so you will have a toolkit of knowledge to interpret things you hear about the real estate market.
For the last Monthly Metric Report of 2023, I am going to summon a thirty-five-year-old tagline that belongs to an athletics footwear/apparel company named after the winged Greek goddess of Victory.
There are some things we can celebrate this month like inflation inching lower, a result of October’s Personal Consumption Expenditure data showing headline inflation was flat for the month. (Headline inflation is the total inflation in an economy.) We can also celebrate interest rates coming down and home values hitting an all-time high. Prices appreciated 6-8% this past year so anyone who bought a home this year should feel victorious with their real estate investment.
Pending Home Sales are the number of homes that are under contract and we learned that this number went down early in the fall. Buyers were reluctant to make an offer on a house because they didn’t like the interest rates on mortgages and low inventory gave them limited options. At this point, the Case-Shiller Home Price Index continued to show steady home value appreciation and yet, many people still decided to wait to buy a home. For someone who can buy a home, should buy a home within a reasonable time frame because every month that they wait, that home becomes more expensive.
Here is where I would repeat the tagline of the company that increased its market share of the North American domestic sport-shoe business from 18% to 43% in the Nineties. I thought a lot about this particular shoe company in 2023 because of a movie that came out telling the story behind one of its extremely successful sponsorships. The famous tagline of the brand states a simple, direct approach to achieving your goals. After you have thought about something deeply and gone back and forth on what your decision should be, Nike would say “Just Do It.” This approach to getting something done is relevant to real estate. We should always do our due diligence and spend time evaluating the merits of our major decisions but sometimes we get stuck. We see the evidence and understand the reasoning behind the idea that now is the best time to buy a home but sometimes we need a simple, direct phrase like “Just Do It” to get us over the threshold.
Mark Thatcher, NMLS #1883412
Tel: 202-394-8469
Email: mark.thatcher@fairwaymc.com
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