Housing Market Falters Amid Rising Prices, Lower-Paying Jobs

By Kathleen M. Howley Jun 20, 2014



The two-year-old U.S. housing recovery is faltering.

The Mortgage Bankers Association yesterday lowered its forecast for combined new and existing home sales in 2014 to 5.28 million -- a decline of 4.1 percent that would be the first annual drop in four years. The group also cut its prediction on mortgage lending volume for purchases to $751 billion, an 8.7 percent decrease and the first retreat in three years.

Bullish forecasts in early 2014 from MBA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been sideswiped by rising home prices and an economy that isn’t producing higher paying jobs. The share of Americans who said they planned to buy a home in the next six months plunged to 4.9 percent last month from 7.4 percent at the end of 2013, the highest in records going back to 1964, according to the Conference Board, a research firm in New York.

“The big housing rally wiped itself out because prices increased too quickly for buyers to keep up,” said Richard Hastings, a consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina, who predicted the slowdown eight months ago. “The pool of eligible new buyers is collapsing” because of stagnant incomes and lack of credit, he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-20/housing-falters-as-forecasters-see-u-s-sales-dropping.html