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November Real Estate Market

This report can be populated from any zip code in the US. We cover 9 zip code markets with our Altos report of the Market Action Index each week, if you would like to know ones that we do not cover here please email or text us, and we can get that info to you. We have a contact us page on our website powellteam.com or our phone numbers where you can text or call us. We can get you this report in a visual format with graphs etc. that may be helpful to you.


How the report works…


median list price for Bend 97701 is $649,000 with the market action index hovering around 39. This is an increase over last month's market action index of 38. Inventory has decreased to 138. Average Days on Market 67, Price Decreased 66%


median list price for Bend 97702 is $699,000 with the market action index hovering around 41. This is an increase over last month's market action index of 38. Inventory has decreased to 169. Average Days on Market 75, Price Decreased 57%


median list price for Bend 97703 is $1,250,000 with the market action index hovering around 36. This is the same as last month's market action index. Inventory has decreased to 133. Average Days on Market 102, Price Decreased 56%


The median list price for Redmond is $575,000 with the market action index hovering around 42. This is an increase over last month's market action index of 38. Inventory has decreased to 163. Average Days on Market 75, Price Decreased 53%


This week the median list price for Sisters is $899,900 with the market action index hovering around 40. This is an increase over last month's market action index of 38. Inventory has increased to 59. Average Days on Market 89, Price Decreased 54%


This week the median list price for Powell Butte is $1,167,500 with the market action index hovering around 30. This is less than last month's market action index of 31. Inventory has increased to 26. Average Days on Market 126, Price Decreased 50%


This week the median list price for Prineville is $499,949 with the market action index hovering around 39. This is about the same as last month's market action index of 39. Inventory has decreased to 96. Average Days on Market 104, Price Decreased 60%


This week the median list price for La Pine is $504,995 with the market action index hovering around 32. This is an increase over last month's market action index of 31. Inventory has held steady at or around 94. Average Days on Market 101, Price Decreased 41%


This week the median list price for Madras is $439,965 with the market action index hovering around 27. This is less than last month's market action index of 28. Inventory has held steady at or around 55. Average Days on Market 100, Price Decreased 58%



· For the last several months the feds have indicated that the increase in interest rates is happening deliberately to curtail the market in hopes of reducing inflation.

· This has purposefully and directly impacted the housing market. We see home sale prices coming down, with days on market increasing, and rates increase.


· The month of October ended with the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 7.08%. According to Freddie Mac. This is the first time that this rate has broken the 7% threshold in 20 years.


· If you crunch the numbers on how this affects housing affordability, the picture is not pretty, to put it mildly, yet I am still amazed at the resilience of the American people. They are not defeated, they have not given up on the housing market, though there is a definite slowing there are people willing to buy and people willing to sell homes. We have not seen a crash even though pressure on the market has continued to increase over the last 7 months.

· In June, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced plans to “reset” the housing market, then elaborated further: “When I say ‘reset,’ I’m not looking at a particular specific set of data. What I’m really saying is that we’ve had a time of a red-hot housing market all over the country, where famously, houses were selling to the first buyer at 10% above the ask, even before seeing the house. That kind of thing. So there was a big imbalance between supply and demand. Houses were going up at an unsustainably fast level.”

· In an attempt to fix this, the Fed has been aggressively, and relentlessly, raising interest rates all year, causing mortgage rates to more than double from the 3%, seven months agot to 7%-plus range now.

· As mortgage rates topped this 7% threshold—a level not seen in two decades—the cost to borrow money for a house is rising beyond what many homebuyers can handle. This, in turn, in theory is supposed to dampen demand, which should then theoretically cause home prices to tumble in their wake. But the real question is, are they? As is the case with the cost of many commodities these days, home prices aren’t completely caving, and should I say not quite yet. Or is there something else going on. I kinda feel like we are holding on, holding our collective breath. Americans do no give up easily. They are a determined, creative people that inevitable find a way to make things work.

· There has been a rise of 4 percentage points from the end of last year’s mortgage interest rate. By contrast, benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yields are up around 2.5 points. What this means is that there is a gap—or spread, in financial lingo—between mortgage rates and Treasury yields, and this has ballooned, roughly over 3 points which is about as high of a spread as it has been this century.

· For the past decade, the spread between a measure of average national mortgage rates and 10-year Treasury yields has been 1.8 points. This year began right around that level, but now we are seeing the biggest gap since the Great Depression. OK what does this mean? Or do we even know what it means?


· Other times recently, that this spread has seen widening, was in late 2008 with the Great Recession and in March 2020, when the financial crisis from the pandemic, was driving investors to the protection of “Treasuries” (which are Treasury Bills, Treasury Bonds, and Treasury Notes – which investors purchase to protect or “save” their money – these are also called government securities .)


· At both of these times, the Federal Reserve has stepped up to buy their own more mortgage bonds, bringing this spread and mortgage rates down. Spreads on mortgage bonds are a key component in the mortgage rates ultimately charged to borrowers.


· But, this time, that isn’t happening: The Fed this year, as part of its plan to shrink its balance sheet, has stopped purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities. Those are packages of mortgage loans issued by government-sponsored enterprises such as Freddie and Fannie Mae.


· As rates have risen, fewer and fewer people are refinancing their mortgages or paying them off early. The reason is obvious, people are sitting on 2-4% mortgage interest rates on their homes and they do not want to lose those, and pay double that rate unless they are forced to by having to move. And I don’t blame them. What this does is it increases the expected lifespan of mortgages and MBS. (mortgage-backed security). And if that lifespan is being held at a lower return for investors, and volatility has jumped, they are not widely anxious to jump in and purchase more, which, if they did would help to hold down the rising mortgage interest rates,

· Yet with the Fed both raising rates and no longer buying mortgage bonds, and with home prices generally in the central bank’s crosshairs, it is no wonder that few are stepping up so far to help keep mortgage rates in check.

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