Bay Area real estate industry remains strong despite nationwide market uncertainty
By CBS Bay Area
For Lauren Kilbourne, there’s a rhythm to selling homes. It begins with preparation, opening doors, turning on lights, and making it easy for someone to picture themselves living there.
Then, it takes patience. Scrolling. Texting. Checking emails.
“Our market is really strong and robust right now. We have a really strong buying and selling market,” said Kilbourne, an East Bay real estate agent.
But one thing she can’t account for is market uncertainty.
“And of course we are always watching the news and seeing how it impacts the market,” she explained.
The current cause of that uncertainty is the ongoing war with Iran.
“It would be the one thing that could impact our market is if these numbers remain volatile,” Kilbourne added.
The conflict has unsettled the housing market across the country.
The day before the war, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was at its lowest point in the past three years, 5.99 percent. But unlike most of the country, real estate agents in the Bay Area aren’t fully feeling the impacts. Buyers, however, are.
Nigel Hughes, who tracks housing markets across the country, says there has already been a noticeable shift.
“We have seen just this week the Mortgage Bankers Association say that applications are down 10 percent in just this past week,” said Hughes, director of market analytics at Homes.com.
Hughes says buyers had just started to get comfortable with rates around six percent, and that the higher that number goes the more that comfort begins to slip.
“That’s what impacts the treasury yield, and the treasury yield impacts the mortgage rates. So, a 30-year mortgage rate going up to 6.5 percent makes your monthly payment more expensive,” Hughes shared.
He says the current state of the market highlights just how bullish the Bay Area housing market remains.
“In February, San Francisco prices were the third highest in the nation, and the number of home sales was the second highest in the nation,” Hughes said.
That’s good news for someone like Kilbourne. But she also knows how quickly that can change.
“We saw that in COVID. When COVID hit, our rates went down dramatically and then our market spiked. Then after COVID, the rates increased and the market fell,” she explained.
Because in this business, what hasn’t happened yet can matter just as much as what has.
