Plan to buy a house in 2022? The good news is that conditions won’t rapidly get out of control the way they did last year. The bad news is that supply remains tight and prices are still on an upswing — and the likelihood of higher mortgage rates looms on the horizon.
Real estate pros say the real estate market this year won’t match the fever pitch it reached in 2021, and the pace of home sales this year will be far less frenzied. “As we move through the year, we will see slower sales activity,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. “Intense multiple-offer days are over… people can take their time.
“There’s no expectation that prices will fall, but our forecast suggests that price appreciation will slow,” said Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist at Fannie Mae. Duncan predicted that while prices won’t repeat the meteoric 18 percent increase they sustained last year, they will still rise somewhere in the neighborhood of 7.5 percent. “That’s not much of a breather, especially because interest rates will be rising at the same time,” he pointed out.
