U.S. Housing: Are Home Prices Decelerating?

As month over month data begins to show a downturn in home prices, will overall price growth and sales begin to fall steeper than expected? Co-Heads of U.S. Securitized Products Research Jim Egan and Jay Bacow discuss.

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Jim Egan: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jim Egan, Co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley.  

Jay Bacow: And I'm Jay Bacow, the other Co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. 

Jim Egan: And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be discussing why home prices could turn negative in 2023. It's Thursday, October 6th, at 3 p.m. in New York. 

Jay Bacow: Jim, it seems like every month the housing data is getting worse when we look at the sales activity. But, now I think I just saw something about home prices falling? What's going on there? I thought we call it home price appreciation, now we're seeing home price depreciation? 

Jim Egan: There is a lot going on out there. There's a lot of volatility, things are moving fast, and yes, there are home price indices that are showing negative numbers. I would caveat that a lot of those negative numbers are month over month, not the year over year that we've typically talked about here. But that doesn't mean it isn't important. 

Jay Bacow: In the past we've talked about this bifurcation narrative where we were going to get a big drop in home sales and housing starts, which we've seen, but home prices were more protected. Do you still believe that? 

Jim Egan: We do still believe in the bifurcation narrative, but the levels of the forecasts have changed, and they've changed for a couple of reasons. I think one reason is that there have been a number of forecast changes, expectations for 2023 are different. Our U.S. economics team has raised their hiking forecast 25 basis points in each of the next three meetings, and our interest rate team on the back of that forecast change has moved up their expectations for the 10 year Treasury. What that move means for us is that the incredible affordability deterioration that we've seen, probably isn't going to get a whole lot better next year. And that's happening in a world in which you mentioned some home prices turning negative. The home price deceleration that we were calling for, from plus 20% all the way down to plus 3% at the end of next year, that relied upon or I can say we expected home prices to fall month over month, but we thought that was going to start in September. It started in July. Sales volumes have been coming in weaker than we thought they would. When we take that weaker than expected housing data, we marry that with different expectations for affordability next year, the forecasts have to change. 

Jay Bacow: And so what exactly are we forecasting for this year and next year? 

Jim Egan: So in this world, we do think that sales are going to fall steeper than we thought. We think that starts are going to fall steeper than we thought, and that next year a single unit starts are going to be lower in 2023 than they were in 2022. We had originally been forecasting a return to growth in 2023, but the change to the forecast that's getting the most attention is that we went from plus 3% year over year growth in December of 2023 to -3% year over year growth by the end of next year. 

Jay Bacow: So if I buy a house today, it might be lower a year from now? That seems worrisome. 

Jim Egan: Yes. And I think there is a positive and a negative headline to that, right. The negative headline, the worrisome, if you will, that you mentioned is that not only is it down 3% next year, but that's down 7% from where we are right now. The positive headline is that even with that decrease in home prices from today, that only brings us back to January of 2022. That's 32% above where they were in March of 2020. 

Jay Bacow: All right, that doesn't seem so bad, given that stocks are a lot lower than where they were in January of 2022. So it's more stalling out than a real correction in home prices. But, why wouldn't home prices fall further from there? 

Jim Egan: We haven't seen anything in the data that changes kind of the underlying narrative that we've been discussing on this podcast in the past. In particular, two things. The first is how robust credit standards have been. If anything, lending standards, which were pretty tight to begin with in the first quarter of 2020, have tightened substantially since then. What that means, again, it constrains sales volumes. We think sales are going to fall more than home prices, but it also means that the likelihood of defaults and foreclosures is limited. And it is those distressed transactions, those forced sellers that we would need to see a leg down in prices. The other point is, away from defaults and foreclosures, actual inventory is still incredibly low. And because current homeowners sit on 30 year fixed rate mortgages, well below the current mortgage rate, when we talk about affordability deteriorating, we're not talking about it deteriorating for current homeowners. They're much more likely to stay in their home, much less likely to list their home for sale, they're not going to be selling into depressed bids. So that credit availability and those tight lending standards, we think that keeps home prices supported. 

Jay Bacow: So home prices are protected because we're not going to get the forced sellers that we saw during the financial crisis and the fundamentals of the housing market are in much stronger footing. What would actually get you, though, to forecast more of a real correction than just the stalling out? 

Jim Egan: I'm going to make this really complicated and say the supply and demand. If demand were to be weaker than we already think it is, and that could happen because the historic deterioration we've seen in affordability has a bigger impact than we think it will. Maybe because the unemployment rate picks up faster than we're expecting it to next year. If you have a much weaker demand environment than we're already envisioning, and you combine that with more supply, perhaps people who'd be a little bit more willing to part with their home at slightly lower prices than we expect them to, people who've owned their home for 10, 15, 20 years and might be looking to downsize. That's where you might have a little bit more of a marriage between uneconomic sellers and depressed demand that could bring home prices lower than we expect. Now, how does all of that, if we think about the implications to investors, what does all that mean for the MBS market? 

Jay Bacow: I'm going to make this really complicated, too. A lot of it comes down to supply and demand. The lack of housing activity and the lower home prices means that there's going to be less supply for mortgage investors to buy. That's good for the mortgage market. The rapid increase in unaffordability has been because of the rapid increase in implied volatility, which is bad for mortgage investors. This has brought nominal spread to the Treasury curve for agency mortgages to levels that are basically at the post GFC wides. And we think that move is a little bit overdone. And so for institutional investors we think this is an opportunity to own agency mortgages versus treasuries as a way to fade some of these moves, and take advantage of some of the more forward looking supply projections that we think will be coming as supply slows down. 

Jay Bacow: But Jim, it's always great talking to you. 

Jim Egan: Great talking to you too, Jay. 

Jay Bacow: And thank you for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on the Apple Podcast app and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.