Altos -founder Mike Simonsen about trends in the housing market

Velt: We can first start with house prices and sales. You said they would grow by around 5%in 2025. Do you still have the feeling that that is a realistic goal?

Simonsen: Our prediction remains plus-5% for the year. During a year you get a few months when the sale is better than others. If the mortgage interest rate has not been reduced by March, we must visit that prediction again and the sales volume of the house will not come true. It’s not there yet, but we start. We have taken a step back to start the year.

Velt: What was your prediction for house prices?

Simonsen: We would get around 3.5% price profits nationally for 2025. If you look at the long -term history of the country, 50 years or more, it is actually quite normal to have a 5% profit in a certain year. We perform under that long -term trend because we have an affordability challenge.

Velt: Talk a bit about that and what you see with a new incoming administration.

Simonsen: It’s not about giving a tax stimulus. We have to build more houses so that the costs of houses fall. One of the challenges with affordability is that we have the crisis at national level, but control is done at a very local level. If we start to get more national recognition and some control changes, some progress may be made.

Velt: Yes, I feel that there are many things coming together. And if you take them separately, such as rates and immigration, then it is not necessarily the full image of things. You also have energy. So it’s hard to say what is actually going to happen.

Velt: Regarding the light places on the market, where do you see the markets that still continue to do very well throughout the country?

Simonsen: So we now have 25% more houses on the market than in January last year. The majority of this has been in the Sun Belt states in the south. Inventaris is much tighter in the rust belt and the northeast. So places like Chicago or Upstate New York. Connecticut now has 70% fewer houses on the market than in 2019.

To close the conversation, Simonsen will investigate more thoughts about the market in the future.

Simonsen: In our prediction document we talked about mortgage interest and we expected the rates to stay in the 6S. But they could get more than 7 – and they already did that. There is no scenario where the rates seem almost 5 and a half seems really far away.