BRIAN SOZZI: All right, from record home prices to record mortgage rates, 2022 has been a wild ride for the now ice-cold housing market. But could this pain be good for prospective homebuyers down the road? Yahoo! Finance Columnist Rick Newman is here with more. So Rick, I should be cheering these declines because maybe at some point, I’ll be able to buy a home.
RICK NEWMAN: Maybe a year from now or something like that. But it’s getting ugly in the housing market. And it’s probably going to get uglier. So we just saw the eighth consecutive month of declining existing home sales. That’s the worst stretch since 2007.
And what was happening in 2007? That was when the housing bubble was exploding. We got the Homebuilders Index this week. That has been going down. That’s now at the lowest level since the bottom of the COVID downturn. And if you don’t count that, it’s the lowest level since 2012. Again, close to the bottom of the housing bust back then.
So we have a long way to go to get through housing. Everybody has kind of seen this coming. I mean, this has almost everything to do with rising interest rates and mortgage rates. Now, up around 7%. But we haven’t seen prices really fall over yet.
