‘Hang in there,’ Utah real estate agents told. What does that mean for buyers and sellers?

Source: The Salt Lake Tribune — 

It’s just two weeks into 2023, and Utah real estate agents are already being told to look to 2024 for things to improve.

Hundreds of them broke into a slow nervous laugh Friday when one of the state’s top housing economists offered them advice after delivering a series of forecasts of more interest rate hikes, falling home sales and other bleak markers this year.

“Just hang in there,” Jim Wood of the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute told them as they gathered for an annual look into their crystal ball. “2024 will be better.”

Here’s some of what they say to expect:

• Utah probably won’t see a recession, though the big job gains it has been enjoying will likely slow down.

• Home prices are dropping relative to their big run-up since 2020 — and nearly a decade before that, for that matter — and they’ll probably keep ticking downward well into this year. But sustained drops amounting to a housing bubble are, in Wood’s words, “extremely unlikely.”

• Future mortgage rates? Projections vary anywhere from 5% to 9% by the tail end of 2023, with prevailing sentiment landing in the 6.5% to 7.5% range. Days of below 3% may be gone for a lifetime.

Home sales in the five-county area centered on Salt Lake City will be sharply down for 2023 and for the country as a whole, forecasters agreed. That’s dejecting news for many home shoppers, real estate agents, the mortgage and title sectors and homebuilders alike.