After a grim housing bubble warning from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas last March, economists with the central bank are back to caution that the U.S. housing market faces more risk.
In March of 2022, economists at the Dallas Fed published a paper titled “Real-Time Market Monitoring Finds Signs of Brewing U.S. Housing Bubble,” which cautioned that home prices were likely to diverge from market fundamentals if there was a widespread belief that home price increases would continue.
The U.S. housing market is beginning to show reliable evidence of being in a bubble, Enrique Martínez-García, a senior research economist at the Dallas Fed, told Fortune at the time.
Using the “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck” analogy, Martínez-García suggested in May 2022 that U.S. and European housing markets had all the telltale signs of being in a housing bubble.
At the same time the Dallas Fed published its housing bubble warning, the U.S. Central Bank went on to issue its first interest rate increase in its fight against inflation. As the pace and size of interest rate hikes increased throughout 2022, housing prices saw a blowoff top and quickly began to fall.
A year later, the Dallas Fed published a follow-up paper titled: “Threat Of Global Housing Slide Looms Amid Rising Rates.”
“While house-price growth has recently begun to moderate — or, in some countries, to decline — the risk of a deep global housing slide persists,” Dallas Fed economists Lauren Black and Martínez-García wrote in the paper.
At the beginning of March, worries of a longer rate cycle began to swirl about, spilling over into the home loan market and causing mortgage rates to shoot higher.
On March 2, 2023, a 30-year fixed mortgage rate jumped back above 7%, the first time since October 2022, according to the Mortgage News Daily rate index. This sudden jump to a 7% mortgage rate stemmed from renewed fears that inflation would rebound higher in the coming months and ultimately elicit additional rate hikes.
The correction needed to bring the U.S. in line with its home price fundamentals is a decline of 19.5%, according to the Dallas Fed.
“Achieving a soft economic landing — taming inflation and avoiding a recession, as the Fed accomplished in 1994 — cannot be taken for granted given that further monetary policy tightening can increase the household mortgage debt … and boost the odds of a severe house price correction,” Dallas Fed economists wrote in the February paper.