Real estate surges to new record value

investmentnews.com:

When last year’s property slump reached its nadir, U.S. real estate lost nearly $3 trillion in value. As mortgage rates surged, buyers turned away in their hundreds of thousands, and sellers despaired.

Fast forward a few months and it looks as if property has bounced back — and bounced to a new record value. Buyers with long-term mortgages have realized that moving and getting a new mortgage would be the height of financial folly — and that means that there is a crippling shortage of available stock.

Real estate brokerage Redfin has crunched the numbers and calculates that real estate is now at a new highest-ever value of $47 trillion, eclipsing the previous peak of just over 12 months ago.

Home owners are “staying put because moving would mean taking on a rate that’s twice as high,” Redfin Economics research lead Chen Zhao said in areport released Friday. “This means buyers who are in the market now are duking it out for a very small pool of homes, preventing home values from plunging.”