Housing demand was fine before the war!
Housing demand was running very smoothly this year, having its best start in years, even with the snow events. We saw multi-year highs in purchase apps and in our weekly pending home sales.
Purchase application data has been positive year over year for every week this year, but last week we saw a hit in demand: week-to-week data declined 5%, and year-over-year growth slowed from 12% to 5%.
Our weekly pending sales data, which will be updated over the weekend in the Housing Market Tracker, was coasting with growth for a long time once we got the snow data out of it, just growth, growth and growth all over the data pool. We will see this weekend how that’s been impacted.
Conclusion
It’s a very frustrating reality that the war has changed mortgage rates so quickly in March. For those in the mortgage and real estate industries who had rates under 6.25% with no volatility, seeing rates move with every headline makes the process of locking rates and getting people in homes much more difficult.
Hopefully, we will get some closure soon because things can get a lot worse with this conflict and rates can go higher, as we still have some legroom to reach my peak forecast of 4.60% on the 10-year yield. On tomorrow’s podcast Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler and I discuss the best and worst outcomes for housing in 2026 due to the escalating conflict.
