Smart Money Hawaii

 Summer came and went, and so did the lower interest rates.  According to Freddie Mac, the benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage average is now north of 6 percent.  The Honolulu Board of Realtors reported that in August, the number of single-family homes sold was down 26.1%, and condos were down 24.7% compared to last year.  However, this stat is a little misleading because although the number of units sold was drastically lower, the median sales price for a single-family home is up 7.2%, while condo median sales prices were down by only 0.3% from a year ago.  The Honolulu Board of Realtors also reported that new listings for single-family homes and condos were down 17.2% and 15.7% respectively compared to the same time last year.  When mortgage rates went up, affordability decreased, ultimately decreasing the number of units sold.  However, home prices did not experience the same dip because the demand for quality homes remains higher than the supply.  This is evidence that lack of

  Will My House Still Sell in Today's Market by Micah Grafsgaard, Paradise Brokers (RB-23305) If recent headlines about the housing market cooling and buyer demand moderating have you worried you've missed your chance to sell, here's what you need to know. Buyer demand hasn't disappeared, it's just eased from the peak intensity we saw over the past two years. Buyer Demand Then and Now During the pandemic, mortgage rates hit record lows, and that suprred a significant rise in buyer demand. This year, as rates increased due to factors like rising inflation, buyer demand pulled back or softened as a result. The latest data from ShowingTime confirms this trend (see graph below): The orange bars in the graph above represent the last few months of data and the clear cooldown in the volume of home showings the market has seen since mortgage rates started to rise. But context is important. To get the full picture of where today's demand stands, let's look at the Ju

“I’m going to wait for rates to go down before I buy.”  I’ve been hearing this statement a lot these days.  While there is nothing wrong with waiting for the right time to buy your home or investment property, I feel it is virtually impossible to time the market.  However, this statement led me down a rabbit hole, and I started to research historical rates and home prices on Oahu.  Freddie Mac has a site that tracks 30-year mortgage rates all the way back to 1971.  The chart does show that since the early 80s, mortgage rates have trended downward until the present day.  It is crazy to think that mortgage rates got as high as 17% during the Reagan Era!  I am so grateful we are not there again.  Next, I went to HiCentral.com to look back at almost 40 years of sales data on Oahu since 1985.  While we could spend hours debating how interest rates and other external factors will lead us into another housing crisis, I thought we’d take a more simplistic look at historical data in 5-year