Happy Tuesday! 👋

This week: short and sweet. If you are in the mood for more and you missed last week’s deep dive, check it out HERE.

Market Snapshot

Nov. 5-11Prev 4 Week Avg.% ChangeOct. 29 to Nov. 4
New Listings5835761.22%544
New Pending Sales721743-2.99%649
New Sales553622-11.06%615
Active Inventory2,5582,765-7.48%2,640
30 Year Fixed Mortgage2.98%3.09%-3.64%3.09%

Buyers came back out in full force.

Mortgage rates were doing just dandy until Wednesday when a slew of bad inflation news came out and spooked bond investors.

Despite the official mortgage rate in our chart above showing a drop last week, as of the time of this writing mortgage rates are in actuality significantly higher than reported (3.125%+).

We’ve talked about this issue before. The weekly published FRED 30 year mortgage rate is the best data available for tracking mortgage rate trends. But it’s important to remember this is NOT real-time data and often trails the market by a full week.

Whenever that data skews significantly from real-time rate movements I’ll make sure to point it out here so you can accurately inform your peers and clients that may be misled by the media headlines that only focus on that official weekly rate.

The inventory situation keeps getting tighter in San Diego. As I wrote about last week, this supply shortage is shaping things up for another buying craze and home appreciation run-up in Q1 and Q2.

The one qualifier that I made sure to include is that if something significant comes in to disrupt buyer demand, then home appreciation could remain tame despite the tight supply.

It’s possible that inflation could be that something.

Despite popular belief, inflation doesn’t actually drive home prices higher. In fact, rising home prices usually comes before inflation (which lines up with how this year has played out). Inflation then brings about higher rates which then slows and sometimes even causes decreasing home values.

 

Inflation is already scaring consumer confidence survey results into the toilet. Consumer confidence plays a significant role in home buyer confidence.
Only time will tell but it’s definitely something I’ll be watching closely and reporting here weekly.

 

In The News

 

The Week Ahead

  • October’s retail sales data on Tuesday will be thoroughly dissected to see how inflation and supply chain issues are impacting the economy at large. Anything that paints a potential picture that inflation will continue higher for longer will be bad for mortgage rates and homebuyer confidence.