Hey everybody. Happy March. Today I’ve got a quick 2025 housing forecast for you just to kind of get an idea of what is expected or what they are prognosticating here for the, ah, for the rest of this year.
So, a couple weeks ago, uhm, James Wood from the Chem C Gardner University of Utah, real estate division, well, the, ah, U of U Business School, he did his annual report to the Board of Realtors and, I’ve just got a few slides for you just to kind of take out a few nuggets just to kind of see what’s going on and what you can expect. So, let’s jump in, again from James Wood, very, very, a credible guy, ah, affordability.
This is, it’s not going to be a shock to any of us, but, looking at this table really quick, the Salt Lake and Tooele Metropolitan areas, we are, uhm, in the top, you know, 20% of the least affordable markets.
There’s only 27 out of 227 areas that are more expensive than we are. Obviously, places like New York, Seattle, you know, Los Angeles, they’re always going to be more expensive, but we are up there as far as, expense.
And the other thing is, too, it’s not just limited to the Salt Lake and Tooele areas. St. George, uh, Provo, Orem, you know, Ogden, Clearfield, they’re all up there.
We’re all in the sort of top 20%. So, the median sales price in Salt Lake County is 28th most affordable.
St. George, just behind it at 30th. Provo, Orem, 31st, and Ogden, Clearfield, 34. So, that means that of the 227 markets that are tracked, we’re, we’re in the top, really, 15%. Um, next up, this is interesting, home sales by price ranges.
The decline in affordability has caused a big shift from single-family homes to condos, as condos are more affordable. Nothing earth-shattering about that, but in 2010, uh, only about 17% of the sales were condominiums versus 83% single-family homes.
That has shifted where condos have almost doubled. They’re now, um, about 31% versus, um, 17%. So now like one out of three sales is a condominium and condos also in the this, you know, account for townhomes and twin homes, but there’s been a huge upshift in, um, houses or in condominiums as opposed to houses in the Salt Lake market. So looking at this chart, it’s kind of fun. You can see this is the price range, homes last year that sold below 300,000 were not even 1% of the market.
Almost everything sold between 300,000 to 700,000, 800,000 was almost the entire market of homes for sale and, um, apparently we had 4 home sales and 1 condo that were north of 5 million.
So there you go. Next up are interest rates. Uh, all the Fed and the Bankers Association, Fannie, Freddie, like but everybody, they finally did it.
Gotten off the schneid and said, look, man, rates are going to stay probably in the sixes. We’re not going back to the threes to the COVID money, not even the fours.
At some point, if we even saw a five handle, like the high fives again, like 599, that would be awesome.
But nobody’s calling for that over the next couple of years. Um, so this is the new norm. And the way that affects you is, is that when things do drop down, we can grab something else.
Looking at the low sixes, you got to jump on it. You don’t want to miss that opportunity, right? So in 2025, kind of the net outlook is that things are going to be a little bit slower with demographics and economic growth.
We’re going to see sales increase by about 8% in condos to about 4,000 units, about Um, again, this is Salt Lake County numbers and the median sales price in Salt Lake County for a house is going to stay around 620, just up a couple percent, just 2%, but not, not 12 or 20% like we’ve seen over the last few years. And condos are going to be up 6% to around 450, um, of an increase of about, um, so the combination of the 2, about 3.3% increase. Now, the last slide I have for you, if you really want to net it out, is this one here. Um, this is what’s keeping everything around 6% and it’s our debt, our national debt. Back when the first Trump administration took office, I’m not going to political here but our debt was at about 20 trillion dollars over the last eight years.
So, you’ve got the Trump administration to the beginning or the really the end of the Biden administration. We’ve seen our debt go from 20 trillion to about 37 trillion, almost double.
If you want to know why things, inflation’s where it’s at, rates are staying higher, whatever, this is the problem and this is what needs to be fixed.
We just, we can’t keep on, you know, Democrat, Republican aside, we just, as a country, we can’t afford to have the debt be this high and the spending to be this crazy and out of control.
So, that’s kind of the, the, the long and the short of it. Um, as always, please reach out if you have questions.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for watching. Uh, have a great day and we’ll see you soon.
Bye for now.
