Around this time every year, crazy weather conditions wreak havoc on various parts of the North American continent. Southeast Michigan neighborhoods don’t have to be threatened directly to have local homeowner nerves on edge, either. Many of us can’t help but be affected by all the shaky iPhone videos of coastal destruction and the mayhem wrought by twisters that suddenly come roaring through communities, no matter how far distant.
So last Thursday, it was a nice change when housingwire.com’s cataclysmic headline brought news of a different kind of disaster. Even though the language shouted, “collapse!”—the effect was comforting. It was a welcome kind of fiasco. More directly, it looked as if Southeast Michigan neighborhoods were going to feel the aftereffects of the debacle that had taken place, yet this time the results promised to be more agreeable than not, especially for homebuyers—but also for local sellers who had been watching mortgage interest rates on the rise.
Housingwire’s disaster was one certain to be felt in housing markets all across the nation—but was a ‘collapse’ to be savored. The headline put it succinctly:
“Mortgage rates collapse on softer inflation data.”
Truly, this was a “disaster” local buyers and sellers would wish to see repeated. The Consumer Price inflation data had come in lower than the most optimistic forecasts. The effect had been immediate, striking. “As a result,” the release said, “mortgage rates went from 7.37% yesterday to 6.67% as of this writing...and mortgage rates will be below 7% today.” And sure enough, by Friday, Fox Business’s “disaster” coverage included how the ‘collapse’ had triggered a ‘plummet.’ But the illustration wasn’t of splintered beams or caved-in foundations: it was a graph of the mortgage interest rate nosedive: “30-year fixed-rate refinance: 6.25%, down from 6.75%.”
There was even more heartening speculation, ending with housing potentially becoming “a positive story in 2023.” It is time to start planning for next year, too—and not too soon to give me a call!
