by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
This is a very bad time for those that work in the real estate industry. Thanks to the Federal Reserve, mortgage rates are much higher than they were a couple of years ago, and this has deeply frozen America’s housing market. Millions upon millions of U.S. homeowners are currently paying off fixed rate mortgages that were financed when mortgage rates were at historic lows. If you are one of those homeowners, selling your current home and buying another home that will come with a mortgage at a much higher rate would be very painful financially. So vast numbers of current homeowners feel “locked in” to their current homes. At this point, the number of Americans that are selling homes has fallen to a depressingly low level, and the number of Americans that are buying homes has fallen to a depressingly low level. This isn’t going to change until interest rates go down significantly, but the Federal Reserve is very hesitant to reduce interest rates because of the nightmarish cost of living crisis that we are facing. So our housing market will probably continue to be in a deep freeze for the foreseeable future.