Survey Reveals Increased Housing Price Growth Expectations

NEW YORK—The New York Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its 2024 SCE (Survey of Consumer Expectations) Housing Survey on May 6 which revealed consumers are expecting home prices and apartment rents to increase sharply over the next 12 months.

The New York Fed in an accompanying Liberty Street Economics blog post detailed the extent low interest mortgage rate lock-ins are negatively impacting U.S. household moving plans.

The results of the 2024 SCE Housing Survey show that the pace at which households expect home prices to rise in the next year has reaccelerated after falling last year, with average one-year-ahead expectations now reaching their second-highest reading in the survey’s history.

In contrast, home price growth expectations for the next five years declined slightly. Expectations about the change in the cost of rent were considerably higher than home price expectations but followed a similar pattern, as rental price growth expectations increased for one-year-ahead and were essentially flat for five years ahead.

Homeowners’ expectations about the likelihood of refinancing their mortgages over the next 12 months rebounded slightly after falling last year, but remain well below pre-pandemic levels. Renters’ views on the ease of obtaining a mortgage deteriorated substantially, with 74.2% stating that obtaining a mortgage is somewhat or very difficult. Further, renters’ self-assessed probability of ever owning a home decreased by 4.3 percentage points to 40.1%, which reflected a series low.

Key findings of the survey:

• Average one-year-ahead home price growth expectations increased to 5.1% in February 2024 from 2.6% in February 2023. This level is slightly above the pre-pandemic mean of 4.2% but below the 2022 series high of 7%. The increase is broad-based across demographic groups, but particularly large for respondents residing in the South. Annualized home price growth expectations for the five-year horizon decreased by 0.1 percentage point to 2.7%, the survey stated.

Rent price growth expectations for the next year increased by 1.5 percentage points to 9.7%, which is the second highest reading in the series since 2022 and reversed last year’s decline. Annualized expectations for the next five years were essentially flat, increasing very slightly to 5.1% from 5.0%.

Housing Outlook

While attitudes toward housing as a financial investment remained strongly positive, they weakened slightly from the previous year, as 67.1% of all respondents characterized buying property in their zip code as a “very good” or “somewhat good” investment. This is slightly below the readings of the last three years, but still above the levels of optimism that prevailed in the pre-pandemic period, according to the report. The share of respondents reporting that housing is a “bad” or “somewhat bad” investment increased to 9.1% from 7.9% a year ago.
Average expectations of residential mobility, the percent chance of moving to a different primary residence, fell to new series lows at both the one-year (13.4%) and three-year (24.5%) horizons, continuing a declining mobility trend since 2014.

Mortgage Rates

On average, households perceive that national mortgage rates are currently higher than pre-pandemic levels and expect them to rise further in the future. Households now expect mortgage rates to rise to 8.7% a year from now and 9.7% in three years’ time, both of which are series highs. Still, households on average believe there is a 61% chance that mortgage rates will fall over the next 12 months, which is also a series high.

Mortgage Rate Lock-In Impacts

In the Liberty Street Economics study of low interest rate mortgage rate lock-ins’ impact on moving plans, the study found that “mortgage rates are not a primary factor in most respondents’ relocation plans for the next three years but are a large constraint for a relatively small but significant share of homeowners.”

The blog post concluded: “Most homeowners in our survey do not seem to be making their moving plans based on mortgage rates. For those who are, the effect of rate cuts on their mobility will ultimately depend on their beliefs about the rate they would qualify for on a new home. Indeed, understanding how households form perceptions of the housing market will be an exciting area of research going forward, and important to understanding the extent to which the lock-in effect reduces mobility.”