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If you’re thinking about buying a home in 2025, you probably know about the double whammy of both home prices and mortgage interest rates increasing in the past few years. While there’s no crystal ball that can predict the specifics of the 2025 housing market, real estate experts do have some predictions for what’s in store for first-time homebuyers in the coming year. Will the persistently high interest rates subside? Will the market flip to be in buyers’ favor? And how will the recent presidential election play into all of this?  It’s hard to say. But there are some silver

The Federal Open Market Committee announced it would be cutting the federal funds rate by half a percentage point, or 50 basis points, putting the benchmark rate at 4.75% to 5%. It’s the first time the rate has been dropped since March 2020. Back then, members of the Fed were concerned that the coronavirus pandemic would lead to widespread job losses and a massive contraction of consumer spending. The effective rate hit 0.05% in April 2020. But after a historically brief recession, the American economy bounced back. In March 2022, the rate began a sharp ascent, reaching 5.33% this month.

  According to the latest update of its forecast for the year, the investment bank expects home prices in the U.S. to fall on average by 3 percent across the country. “We think we are poised for an improvement in affordability that we have only seen a handful of times over the past ~35 years,” Morgan Stanley wrote in the report shared with investors. As of October 31, the latest data available on Zillow, the average home price in the U.S. was $346,653, up 1.8 percent from a year prior. According to several analysts, the pick-up in home prices is

Last month, one-bedroom apartments in Oakland experienced a significant decline in rental prices at a 7.2% drop compared to the previous year, marking the most substantial drop among the 100 largest cities in the United States, according to data from Apartment List. The median rent for a one-bedroom unit in Oakland stood at $1,430 in September, the city’s lowest rental rate since at least 2017, and more than $100 lower than the rental price for last year. The price drop extended to the broader San Francisco metropolitan area, where there was a smaller year-over-year decrease of 4.3%, putting median rents

  According to recent data, the typical value of a Berkeley home plummeted by a staggering $183,052, resulting in an 11.31 percent decline. This downward trend is part of a broader cooling trend affecting real estate in several California cities, and the Bay Area, in particular, has been the hardest hit, claiming the top four spots for the most dramatic drops in home values nationwide. In this blog post, we’ll explore the factors contributing to this decline, its implications for homeowners and prospective buyers, and the measures being taken to address the situation. A Cooling Trend Across California: Berkeley is

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, home prices have been fluctuating nonstop. With many employees transitioning to remote work, people suddenly were able to move to different parts of the country, as they no longer had to worry about living near their office. Some opted to move out of major cities to the suburbs, and others chose to buy homes near beaches and in locales with warmer temperatures. Because of this, some U.S. home prices have skyrocketed, while others have been rapidly decreasing. The team looked at data from the National Association of Realtors to see where home prices

  The Bay Area economy is facing an uphill battle with rising interest rates, rising inflation and a soft real estate market. Most homeowners that are attempting to sell their homes are experiencing longer than usual days on the market, lowball offers and frustration on where the market is heading. It appears that more bad news may be coming as inflation may not be an easy tiger for the Federal Reserve to tame. US unemployment is near an all time low and there are reports that predict more interest rate hikes may be needed to reduce consumer spending and inflation.

  A high income is an increasingly weak opponent for the supply strain and sapped spending power plaguing the U.S. housing market. The number of households renting while making $150,000 or more per year has skyrocketed in recent years, according to the Wall Street Journal. Five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show the share of renters increased to 3 million, an 87 percent from 2016 to 2021.     The median income for the 44 million households renting in 2021 was $71,000. The biggest surge of high-income rental households came in Austin. Those households in the Texas capital increased

San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area saw apartment rents fall in January at a higher rate than the national average, another sign of a slowing Bay Area economy that could be hurt further by mass tech layoffs. San Francisco median rents fell 1.1% to $2,174 per month compared to December, one of the biggest drops in the country. Metro area rents are down 5% compared to March 2020 when the pandemic started, making San Francisco and San Jose the only two metro areas with more than 1 million people that have rents that are below pre-pandemic levels.

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index for single-family home values within the San Francisco Metropolitan Area – which includes the East Bay, North Bay and Peninsula – ticked down another 1.8 percent this past December and is now 4.2 percent lower than at the end of 2021, representing the largest year-over-year drop for the index over a decade.  In fact, the “San Francisco” index has actually dropped over 16 percent since last May and the decline is accelerating, none of which should catch any plugged-in readers, other than the most obstinate, by surprise.     At a more granular level, the index