The CoreLogic Home Price Insights report features an interactive view of our Home Price Index product with analysis through August 2021 with forecasts from August 2022. CoreLogic HPI™ is designed to provide an early indication of home price trends. The indexes are fully revised with each release and employ techniques to signal turning points sooner. CoreLogic HPI Forecasts™ (with a 30-year forecast horizon), project CoreLogic HPI levels for two tiers—Single-Family Combined (both Attached and Detached) and Single-Family Combined excluding distressed sales.
National home prices increased 18.1% year over year in August 2021, according to the latest CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI®) Report. The August 2021 HPI gain was up from the August 2020 gain of 5.9% and was the highest 12-month growth in the U.S. index since the series began in 1976. The increase in home prices was fueled by low mortgage rates, low for-sale supply and an influx in homebuying activity from investors. Projected increases in for-sale supply and moderation in demand as prices grow out of reach for some buyers could slow home price gains over the next 12 months.
An increasing number of millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996, are in or are approaching their first-time homebuying years. Older millennials, meanwhile, are in the age-range for a move-up purchase. According to the CoreLogic® Loan Application Database, millennials made up 67% of first-time home purchase applications and 37% of repeat home purchase applications in 2021. Millennials have made up the largest share of home purchase mortgage applications since 2016, accounting for 51 percent of home-purchase mortgage applications in 2021, up five percentage points from 2019
Home equity – the difference between the value of a home and the amount of mortgage debt on the home – is an important component of overall household wealth. Changes in the amount of home-equity wealth will be primarily affected by growth in home values and pay down of mortgage loan balances. For the last few years, home-value appreciation has been the major creator of wealth.
This month, the nation’s average monthly rent for a luxury apartment will top $2,000 for the first time. As such, the rent premium for Class A properties over Class B communities is climbing again, after the top-tier projects took a pricing hit in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back over the past decade or so, the difference in effective asking rents between the two product segments went from just over $300 in 2010 to a whopping $500 in early 2020.
At the end of September 2021 – 18 months after the passage of the CARES Act which provided millions of homeowners the protection of COVID-19 payment forbearance – many mortgage loans are expected to reach the end of forbearance. That is, of an estimated 1.7 million mortgage loans that are in forbearance at the start of August, more than 1.2 million loans will reach the maximum 18-month term limit at the end of September, representing 73% of the total forbearance plans.
U.S. demand for apartments continued to soar in 3rd quarter 2021. Preliminary calculations from RealPage, Inc. showed that the nation’s occupied apartment count jumped by 255,094 units during the July to September time frame. That’s the biggest quarterly product absorption figure seen in records that go back to the early 1990s. The annual demand volume as of 3rd quarter registered at 597,354 units in the preliminary stats. That figure soared beyond the past economic cycle’s peak of some 380,000 units absorbed in the year-ending 3rd quarter 2018.
The infamous dot plot from the Federal Reserve meeting last week suggests an expectation of a 2022 liftoff for U.S. interest rates. But who knows, forecasting interest rates is not like forecasting commercial property market trends: a lot can happen quickly. Still, seeing that chart, market professionals are asking if cap rates will go up if that expectation comes to pass in 2022. My question is, why should cap rates start responding to interest rates now all of a sudden?
Multifamily building permits and housing starts were both up sharply in August. The seasonally adjusted annual rates for multifamily permits (which include both apartments and condominiums) were up 19.7% from July and almost 53% from August 2020 to 632,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The more impressive bounce is from last month as permitting activity slowed during the early pandemic months last year, creating a lower base. Meanwhile multifamily starts were up 21.6% from July and 60.1% from last August to 530,000 units.
Welcome to the October Apartment List National Rent Report. Our national index increased by 2.1 percent from August to September. Although month-over-month growth has slowed slightly from its July peak, rents are still growing much faster than the pre-pandemic trend. Since January of this year, the national median rent has increased by a staggering 16.4 percent. To put that in context, rent growth from January to September averaged just 3.4 percent in the pre-pandemic years from 2017-2019.
Renters in market-rate, professionally managed apartments tend to command significantly higher wages and pay a materially lower share of income toward rent when compared to the broader renter population, according to a new study by RealPage analyzing millions of leases signed over the last decade. Median rent-to-income ratios consistently hovered around 22% between 2010 and 2020 in professionally managed, market-rate apartments – which comprise about 30% of the nation’s 47.2 million rentals.
The composition of lenders in the U.S. commercial mortgage market has largely returned to its form before the Covid-19 crisis struck, the latest US Capital Trends report shows. CMBS originators, who had been particularly hard hit in the second quarter of 2020, captured an 18% share of the commercial mortgage market in the past quarter, which put them behind only regional/local banks as the largest source of financing. The rebound reflects an easing of the uncertainty in the lending market, which had limited CMBS originators to just a 1% share of lending a year ago.
U.S. single-family rent growth increased 8.5% in July 2021, the fastest year-over-year increase in 16.5 years, according to the CoreLogic Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI). The index measures rent changes among single-family rental homes, including condominiums, using a repeat-rent analysis to measure the same rental properties over time. The July 2021 increase was nearly five times the July 2020 increase, and while the index growth slowed last July, rent growth is running well above pre-pandemic levels when compared with 2019.
After a year of ups and downs, student housing operators wrapped the Fall 2021 leasing season strong in terms of pricing. Student housing rents ended the leasing season up 2.3% from the previous August, the best year-end rent growth since 2016 when rent growth hit 2.6%. This year’s strong rate also stands in contrast to 2020’s lackluster year-end rent performance of 1.2%. It’s hard to image how Fall 2021’s rent performance could be any more encouraging after a year of uncertainty caused by the global pandemic. Fall 2021 annual rent change is the second-best of the last decade.
The pandemic has influenced homebuyers’ decision on where to buy a home. Our previous analysis showed that homebuyers who relocated to another metro in 2020 were often choosing metros that were either adjacent to their current location, had a lower cost of living or both. Although homebuyers were considering affordability and proximity while buying homes even before COVID-19, the migration rate grew during the pandemic. With the combination of low inventory, low interest rates and a shift to a more flexible working environment
After rent collections at the country’s professionally managed apartments got off to a rough start in September, payment levels climbed sharply during the second week of the month. Results still were not quite back to normal, however, due to difficulties in markets hit hard by Hurricane Ida. Looking specifically at market-rate projects where RealPage software is used to manage the property, the share of households making September’s rent payment by the 13th was off 1.8 percentage points from year-earlier results.
A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic and loss rates for U.S. commercial real estate loans are not looking that bad. With the exception of the hotel and CBD office sectors, loss rates so far are well below the pace set through this stage of the Global Financial Crisis. The macroeconomic factors driving loan performance were simply different in this downturn. Investor tolerance for risk has followed a unique path during the Covid-19 downturn, one that varies from that seen during the GFC.
ATTOM, curator of the nation’s premier property database, today released its second-quarter 2021 U.S. Home Flipping Report showing that 79,733 single-family homes and condominiums in the United States were flipped in the second quarter. Those transactions represented 4.9 percent of all home sales in the second quarter of 2021, or one in 20 transactions – the first increase in more than a year. The second quarter home flipping rate was up from 3.5 percent, or one in every 29 home sales in the nation, during the first quarter of 2021.
The CoreLogic Loan Performance Insights report features an interactive view of our mortgage performance analysis through June 2021. Measuring early-stage delinquency rates is important for analyzing the health of the mortgage market. To more comprehensively monitor mortgage performance, CoreLogic examines all stages of delinquency as well as transition rates that indicate the percent of mortgages moving from one stage of delinquency to the next.
The nation’s overall delinquency rate was 4.4% in June. The serious delinquency rate fell to its lowest level since May 2020. In June 2021, 4.4% of home mortgages were in some stage of delinquency (30 days or more past due, including those in foreclosure), which was a 2.7-percentage point decrease from June 2020 according to the latest CoreLogic Loan Performance Insights Report . However, overall delinquencies were still above the early 2020 pre-pandemic rate of 3.6%.
