Housing markets

Buyer affordability has decreased by almost 22% in the past year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Declining mortgage rates and home prices drove more positive views compared to the prior month, but December's overall outlook remained negative, Fannie Mae said.

House hunting activity also slowed in December, with home tours declining 69% from the start of the year, a Redfin report found.

Sales of high-end homes fell 38.1% year-over-year, per a Redfin report.

But the lower rates of the past month did result in a $7-billion boost to its origination forecast for 2022.

Borrowers gained an average of $34,300 in home equity since the third quarter of last year, but that's almost half the amount of growth recorded over the summer.

Home prices dropped again on a monthly basis in October, exacerbating the loss in home equity among recent buyers, but the size of the falloff was the smallest since June.

"This is Han Solo in carbonite: This is a market that could stay frozen for quite some time," said Benjamin Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

The decline in loan activity and softening prices also helped drive down builder sentiment for the 11th month in a row.

The $1.3 trillion decline was the largest quarterly drop in dollar volume and the biggest falloff on a percentage basis since 2009, according to Black Knight.

The closure of its nationwide retail business — which followed the shuttering of its consumer direct business in Q2 — pushed the Florida bank into a $1.4 million loss for the most recent quarter.

Quarterly numbers also show the smallest gain in appreciation since 2011, with values decreasing on an unadjusted basis, according to Fannie Mae.

Decline was largely driven by a large dip in cash-out refinance locks.

On the other hand, the economists from the UCLA Anderson Forecast claim the U.S. is not currently in a recession and that the chance of a recession in the next 12 months is less than 50%.

Rate and term refinance activity has practically disappeared compared with 12 months ago, and volume for the less rate sensitive cash-out product is much lower.

BofA Securities Inc. predicts that single-family rental securitizations — which repackage a single loan tied to multiple properties — will fall to just $2 billion for the rest of 2022 as Federal Reserve rate hikes send shivers across the industry.

Housing's unusually high appreciation rates have now slowed for three months straight, and the number of metropolitan areas that are considered overvalued keeps growing, according to CoreLogic.

At the same time, the share of overall vacancies fell due to limited inventory, according to a new Attom report.

Their activity was below the record share hit at the start of 2022, and down from the high water mark of 93,700 properties bought in the third quarter last year.

Despite some moderation in overall supply prices, concrete products are running consistently higher.