‘Experts’ still implying you should wait to buy a home because of poor analysis

Ya gotta love the Real-estate experts. The Realtors' chief economist Lawrence Yun says home sales and prices are up because people are taking advantage of the lower mortgage rates.

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6.6%!? That is the rate they said killed the market a year ago.

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The FACT is that 3% mortgage rates were extraordinarily low by post-WW II standards and people like Lawrence Yun and Wall Street Journal writer Nicole Friedman who wrote today's article cannot be bothered to Google “home mortgage rates historical” to put their analysis in perspective.

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Almost all my real estate investing career has been in an above-7% interest rate market. I'm glad I invested in 1969 and since. And I and others my age laugh at ignorant "experts" who tell millions that what we did cannot be done.

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Same feeling about draftees who “aren't good soldiers because they don't want to be there.” Oh, is that so? And here I thought draftees won the Civil War, WW I and WW II, and that my father and uncles who were draftees were good soldiers. Not to mention my own Vietnam draftees who were better than my volunteers.

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But who am I to contradict young know-it-alls who work for the WSJ.

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Friedman still whines about high prices, low inventory, and sellers not wanting to give up their low-interest-rate mortgages. The prices are what they are. I never recall a market when people said the prices were low. There is a name for people who whine like that: tenants.

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In 2021, when Nicole Friedman was telling everyone to sit out the market waiting for "acceptable" prices to return, my wife, and son and I bought a house. We looked at three, bid on two, and bought one. This is when people were making 27 offers and buying none.

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Bid higher, idiots. We paid $900,000. ZIllow today says it's worth over a million. Thank you Nicole for saving us from the big mistake of paying $900,000 for that—NOT. What is our mortgage rate on that house? 2.95%. If you followed Nicole's advice to wait for lower prices, you got no such price and lost the 3% mortgage you could have had.

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As usual, Nicole's article buries the lead at the bottom of the page. Median home prices rose 5.1% from 1/1/23 to 1/1/24. That price now is $379,100. So Nicole and Yun saved you from making that approximately $15,000 profit in one year with their ignorant pontificating. If you bought with 20% down, that $15,000 profit would have been a $15,000 / $76,000 down payment = 20% return on investment.

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One big mistake that Friedman and Yun make is to assume everyone has a mortgage or wants one and everyone can sell or postpone selling based solely on prices and interest rates. None of that is true.