Squeezed by high interest rates and record prices, homeowners are frozen in place. They can’t sell. So first-time buyers can’t buy.
If buying a home is an inexorable part of the American dream, so is the next step: eventually selling that home and using the equity to trade up to something bigger.
But over the past two years, this upward mobility has stalled as buyers and sellers have been pummeled by three colliding forces: the highest borrowing rates in nearly two decades, a crippling shortage of inventory, and a surge in home prices to a median of $434,000, the highest on record, according to Redfin.
People who bought their starter home a few years ago are finding themselves frozen in place by what is known as the “rate-lock effect” — they bought when interest rates were historically low, and trading up would mean a doubling or tripling of their monthly interest payments.
They are locked in, and as a result, families hoping to buy their first homes are locked out.
Our starting salaries were indeed low. We purchased at the end of 2017 and interest rates had already gone up to 4.7%. And our property taxes are covered by escrow which is rolled into our mortgage payment. Property taxes have also more than doubled on our current house and our escrow payment has gone way up as a result.
And we have also since had a baby, so a lot of our general expenses have increased along with all the general inflation prices increases associated with just living.
Okay, gotcha. So in your situation, its not just interest rates that are keeping you where you are but other things unrelated to rates such as property taxes, general expenses and new baby (congratulations!).
Thanks! We want a second child, and I am very risk-averse. So we requested pre-approval for $375k. Could we afford more? Technically. But it is a much tighter squeeze than we feel comfortable with especially with wanting to expand our family.
Interest rates are only a small part of my personal hesitancy behind selling/buying. The much larger portion is the lack of inventory in anything that is less than $400k in my area. Flippers and real estate companies are buying everything with cash. And I also recognized that we are very privileged to be where we are now. In 2017 I felt that if we didn’t buy at that time (even though we took on a bit of PMI to do it and have since eliminated it) we would never be able to buy. Seems I was correct sadly.
We traded up to a newer house a couple of years ago (right before the interest rates went bonkers). I was in a similar pricepoint to you for target house. I found something interesting (in my area at least):
There is HUGE competition in the sub $300k pricepoint. Absolute vultures circling all the time for any house that comes on the market. Its not just Private equity, its first time homebuyers, its downsizers, and also mid income first time landlords that consumed the last 15 years of personal financial advice about “passive income”. That put me looking in the $350k-$400k. What I found here was not much of an upgrade from the $275k house we were selling. However, the $425k-$475k was a disproportional huge upgrade! I would have expected the “upgrade value” to linear. Its not! We ended up getting one posted for sale in this range. It has appreciated over $100k more in value in the last 2 years.
When you get around to looking again, see if you see this same behavior reflected in your local housing market.
I completely understand that. You have to plan for all sorts of other life contingencies under those circumstances. Cost like child care in the future will also certainly have budget impacts.
We’re still looking currently, so I can say that it’s fairly accurate for here as well. Except we really don’t have downsizers because they are retiring elsewhere. It was already brutal in the sub-$250k market in 2017 and it has only gotten worse.