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Interesting exercise: assume all new house buyers are "payment buyers", and calculate the impact on house prices of mortgage rates moving from 3% to 4%. From m

• pjmorris 10y ago
  And at ~5 million home sales/year, and an average home price of $240,000, a 10% drop in prices would be about $110B. That's deflation noticeable at the GDP level. My first mortgage (2001) was 7.25%.
• notlisted 10y ago
  But... is this a 10% drop across the board? I suspect it will impact the higher-priced market segment especially. My logic: Higher interest rates -> Fewer people can afford the more expensive houses -> More competition for (interest in) lower-priced homes -> Lower-priced homes might actually see a price increase (bidding wars, etc.) while higher-end segment suffers from lack of interest/smaller pool of buyers. We bought a smaller and cheaper house than we could afford based on that logic… :-)
  • frankydp 10y ago
    The Jumbo loan cap will also wierdly effect this scenario. 417k to 625k depending on median county home price. You can sometimes see prices tightly grouped around the limit, plus or minus down payment percentages. Then you are also talking about weird buyer preferences for buyers with lots of cash, who can pay down the lending amount to the cap, or sellers that will split assets so that each sale is below the cap. Lots of strange market things happen around those caps.