Many Americans who want to move are trapped in their homes—locked in by low interest rates they can’t afford to give up. The reluctance of homeowners to sell differentiates the current housing market from past downturns and could keep home prices from falling significantly on a national basis.
Pedestrian foot traffic in U.S. urban downtowns was down about 25% in April compared with the same month in 2019 with urban retail availability surpassing suburban availability for the first time since 2013.
New single-family home sales are bouncing back with supply tight in the existing-home market. Active listings in March stood at roughly half of where they were four years earlier, in part because higher mortgage rates made many homeowners reluctant to sell and give up their current low rates.
Nearly 30% of San Francisco’s office space is vacant, which is more than seven times the rate before the pandemic hit, and the biggest increase of any major U.S. city.
Small cities in the Midwest topped The Emerging Housing Markets Index in the first quarter, a sign that buyer demand for affordable homes remains robust even as activity in the broader market slows.
U.S. existing-home sales decreased 2.4% in March from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.44 million. March sales fell 22% from a year earlier and marked the 13th time in the previous 14 months that sales have slowed.
The U.S. office vacancy rate reached a milestone in the first quarter when it rose to 12.9%, exceeding the peak vacancy rate during the 2008 financial crisis, with office-building prices down 25% since early 2022.
15% of insurers with commercial real-estate lending businesses are planning to shrink their activity this year. That’s more than three times as many in the same survey last year.
Nearly 23% of the commercial real estate loans in CRED iQ’s database that are secured by properties within the Minneapolis MSA are delinquent or in special servicing. That positions the market as the worst performing among the nearly 400 MSAs the company tracks nationwide, which encompasses more then $900 billion in outstanding commercial real estate debt.
