By Alex Roha | HousingWire
A full month of sub-3% mortgage rates, ongoing housing market supply constraints, and a 300% increase in lumber prices over the past 15 months has prompted Fannie Mae‘s Economic and Strategic Group to revise several of its 2021 forecasts.
March’s existing home sales report perfectly illustrated the country’s core housing market issues – a decade of under-building led to a 3.7% decline in transactions from the prior month, even though there’s never been more demand for a home.
“We have long expected that a combination of waning COVID-19-induced movement into single-family housing and continued tight inventories would lead to a slowing pace of existing home sales as the year progresses,” the ESR group said. “However, the latter factor appears increasingly more limiting.”
