IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
California’s housing market should remain strong in 2018, although the state will still be plagued by not enough homes being built as well as an affordability problem, according to a report released Thursday.
The state’s housing recovery is expected to continue through next year, but not at the pace it has maintained during the past few years, the California Association of Realtors stated in its 2018 California Housing Market Forecast.
Sales of single-family homes are expected to rise one percent next year, to 426,200 units. That would be a modest increase from the 421,900 sales projected for this year.
Interest rates on a typical 30-year fixed mortgage will rise to 4.3 percent in 2018, up from four percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2016. Median home prices are expected to rise 4.2 percent, to $561,000.
“This year’s housing market can be told as a tale of two markets – the inventory constrained lower end and the upper end that’s non-inventory constrained,” said Leslie Appleton Young, the association’s senior vice president and chief economist, in a statement. “This trend is likely to continue into 2018 as active listings have declined across all price ranges for the past two years, [mostly] at the lower end.”
