This is what a dying housing market looks like

Hey everybody, Real Estate Ninja here. Hopefully you're doing great. Existing home sales, they just plunged this last month in March despite falling mortgage rates. Now, let me stop there because we just saw mortgage rates completely spike up in the last couple of weeks because of the U.S. and Iran conflict, right? The price of oil going up, uncertainty. So bond traders are demanding more higher interest rates on their 10-year bond especially. And so as those rates go up, mortgage rates go up. But we're gonna talk about just a couple of months ago. Okay, we're gonna talk about this data because this still shows you how serious the housing market is. It says here, home sales, existing home sales came down. The SAR back below 4 million homes, right? This is near the lowest level since Lehman Brothers collapsed, okay? Says that National Association of Realtors report showed that the median selling price rose 1.4% from a year earlier in March to 408. Now, what's interesting about that is here we have two things going on. You have existing home sales are collapsing. So there's less home selling, especially at a time where home listings are about to increase, right? But everybody loves to look at that number. Hey, the median price, the median selling price rose 1.4%. Well, that's at $408,000. During a real estate crisis, the most expensive priced homes fall the fastest and the most, all right? There's still always a group of people around here that know nothing about real estate cycles, and they just dive right in because they're listening to a real estate agent said, hey, this is the perfect time to buy. And they listen to that person because they have a badge. It's not necessarily a badge of honor. And they go, oh, well, if that person says it's a good time to buy, I'm gonna go buy. And they probably, and the small group of people that are new to the real estate market that buy at the lowest end of the spectrum when it comes to price, home prices, all they've been listening to is people talk about how real estate has done nothing but go up over the last handful of years. And that's true because of a worldwide pandemic and super low rates. So they dive in, and then that price only pushes up like 1%. That's not a lot. That's a year over year increase, not a one month, a month over month. That's a one year increase. So that's an important number, right? So it says here, the inventory of previously owned homes edged up to a four month high, but remains historically depressed. Let me explain that. So these existing homes, the inventory to sell is edging up, but only in four months. The historical low part of it is because homeowners are, you know, they've got golden handcuffs on because they're tied to these ultra low mortgage rates, and they simply cannot move. Now, we have an interesting phenomenon that also is happening as baby boomers are starting to pass away. And this segment of the population is actually the largest segment, age group demographic we've got right now. And they are doing two things. Some of them are straight up passing away, and their children are selling off their homes because they're already established. They don't want the home, right? And they are also, those that have got lots of life left back in them, they are trading down. They are migrating, okay? But a lot of them simply can't leave because they can't even afford to sell in California and buy in Florida because sure, the home may be cheaper, but holy cow, the mortgage interest is massive, and the insurance costs, if you can even get insurance, is huge. So this is a whole nother thing. I've also spoken with a lot of baby boomers that say they don't like the psychological damage of selling their home that has their property taxes low, and then moving to a place and buying a place where the property taxes are super high. They can't stomach that thought. So you see you have this massive quandary, and to be honest with you, all of it leads to much lower prices in homes. The fact of the matter is, when the NAR puts out these numbers, these are not the same numbers, the median home sale price, as the FRED, because the FRED is showing a three-month low on the national median sale price of homes. So it's really interesting where you get all of these data. It's very convoluted, but it's really coming to a perfect storm in the real estate market. It says here, sales in the Northeast slid to the lowest on record in data going back to 1999, while those in the Midwest matched the weakest pace since 2011. The National Association of Realtors also slashed its 2026 existing home sales forecast to 4%. Now check this out, from 14% they had previously. Talk about a massive write-down, not write-down, but a massive turn of events, a change of their attitude towards the housing market. These are the things where, if you see them all coming together, you shouldn't be buying homes right now, or if you want to buy a home, what you wanna do is you want to put yourself in a position where you are negotiating the best price ever. You need to understand these real estate cycles. If you want, I'll throw the link down to the four courses, including the Real Estate Cycles course. It will change the way you look at investing in real estate, and I'll make it 49 bucks for all four courses. And to be honest with you, I just wanna be able to earn your business as a financial educator, because a lot of people, I mean, to sit there and say, oh, I'll put all this information on YouTube, technically I have, but it's over like 1,000 videos. There's so much to learn about real estate cycles that they never teach real estate agents, they never teach brokers. I was a real estate agent and I owned a brokerage. I owned a property management company. I've been a real estate investor. I never learned this from any one of schools that I had to go to to get my certificates, my licenses. This is only learned by reading a ton of books and paying attention to really OG real estate investors that teach these cycles, and it's very vital information, because I think next year, it's not gonna be just the NAR slashing its numbers, it's gonna be Wall Street too. All right, with that being said, thank you so much for watching. The Real Estate Ninja is out.