Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / A Housing Market Tug-of-War | S2 E067 | 08-19-25

Transcript

A Housing Market Tug-of-War | S2 E067 | 08-19-25 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:00
  Megan Horneman: Any signs of good news out of the housing market is good news for us.
• 0:03
  Megan Horneman: It's Tuesday, august the 19th, and this is Markets with Megan.
• 0:07
  Megan Horneman: If you like this podcast, please you can subscribe.
• 0:10
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• 0:14
  Megan Horneman: But we're here today to go over some of the economic data that we saw this morning, and this week is a big week from the housing market perspective, so we kick it off with the housing starts and building permits for the month of July, and what we saw was a little bit of a mixed bag, but we're going to look at the positive.
• 0:29
  Megan Horneman: In this report we saw that housing starts, or those that are starting construction they rose much more than expected in July, up 5.2%, and the expectation was for them actually to decline by about 2%.
• 0:42
  Megan Horneman: When you look at building permits though this can be a future leading indicator on housing construction that actually fell a bit more than expected and that was down 2.8% versus an expectation of just falling by about 0.5%.
• 0:58
  Megan Horneman: But let's dig into these details.
• 1:00
  Megan Horneman: What we've seen is that those housing starts primarily in the single-family homes, so this is bringing some more inventory on the market, which is exactly what we need to see to start to thaw some of this housing market.
• 1:12
  Megan Horneman: You saw single-family homes.
• 1:14
  Megan Horneman: They rose about 3% on a month-over-month basis.
• 1:17
  Megan Horneman: You also saw that the multifamily units rose almost 10% for the month and that was on the back of about a 34% increase the prior month.
• 1:27
  Megan Horneman: So we're seeing some headwinds here from that construction standpoint.
• 1:31
  Megan Horneman: The only downside that we see in this is that the multifamily home permits.
• 1:36
  Megan Horneman: They actually fell about 8% for the month.
• 1:39
  Megan Horneman: So we're going to take the positive in that that we're starting to see construction on both the single family and the multifamily rising.
• 1:47
  Megan Horneman: What we have seen this year is that the mortgage rate has been coming down.
• 1:51
  Megan Horneman: We saw the mortgage rate peak out this year a little over 7%.
• 1:56
  Megan Horneman: I think it was about 7.1% and that was early in January.
• 2:02
  Megan Horneman: We're now looking at the average 30-year mortgage rate down to about 6.75%.
• 2:08
  Megan Horneman: So we are seeing some improvement here on that mortgage rate, which is bringing some of the construction to the market.
• 2:15
  Megan Horneman: We'll be back this week.
• 2:17
  Megan Horneman: We were out last week on vacation, but we'll be back this week to catch up with some of the economic data, not only from the housing perspective, but we also have a lot of stuff going on in Washington.
• 2:30
  Megan Horneman: So if you want a history of our podcast as well?
• 2:31
  Megan Horneman: You can go to marketswithmeganfm.
• 2:32
  Megan Horneman: Thank you.