Redfin: Tariff Fears Drive Up Mortgage Rates, Throwing 2025 Off-Track

On The Market

BiggerPockets

News, Investing, Business, Education

4.8 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Could Trump’s proposed tariffs be the reason for the recent rise in mortgage rates? Could this slow the housing market and cause affordability to get worse? What happens if rates stay higher for longer and more homebuyers get kicked out of the market? We’re talking to Redfin’s Chen Zhao about how tariffs will affect you and the surprising findings from a new homeowner survey foreshadowing something none of us wanted to see about housing inventory. Tariffs could change many things: they could increase construction costs for houses, lead to higher inflation and higher mortgage rates, or put jobs back into American communities. Does the market believe the Trump administration will go forward with their flat tariff for most countries? Or will they pick and choose specific exporters within specific countries to tack a tariff onto? Plus, why are sixty percent of homeowners planning NOT to sell their homes in the near future or…ever? If higher mortgage rates remain, will all those homeowners with low mortgage rates stay put without downsizing or moving, locking up housing inventory tighter than it currently is? It’s possible, potentially leading to long-term declines in real estate prices. But don’t worry, Chen breaks down the entire timeline. In This Episode We Cover Trump’s tariffs and the effect they’re having on mortgage rates Redfin’s shocking new homeowner survey that points to more locked-up inventory Is a real estate price correction coming? Why prices could slump after rising Whether or not the market thinks Trump will go forward with vast tariff proposals Why interest rates could stay higher for longer than many of us expected And So Much More! Links from the Show Join the Future of Real Estate Investing with Fundrise Join BiggerPockets for FREE Find Investor-Friendly Lenders Dave's BiggerPockets Profile BiggerPockets Daily Podcast 1263 - Investors: Stop Worrying About Interest Rates—Here’s Why Right Now Is the Time to Buy Redfin: More Than One-Third of Homeowners Say They’ll Never Sell Grab Dave’s Book, “Real Estate by the Numbers” Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/on-the-market-290 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	A fear of tariffs is driving up mortgage rates right now and slowing down the market.
0:11.7	Today, we're uncovering how and why tariffs are playing such a big role in the housing market right now,
0:18.8	and why some forecasts for 2025, including my own,
0:22.2	might already be wrong.
0:24.1	Joining me to talk about all of this is Redfin's chief economist Chen Zao, who is going
0:29.5	to help us understand this whole situation with tariffs and share some insights into why
0:33.8	all this stuff that President Trump has been talking about is spilling over into mortgage rates
0:39.7	and subsequently into the housing market.
0:42.3	Plus, she's going to share with us a pretty crazy new survey.
0:46.1	It was shocking to me, showing that a third of homeowners plan to never sell their homes.
0:52.0	And Chen is going to share what I think is a pretty hot take on the long-term
0:56.3	value of real estate. Let's jump in. Chen, welcome back to On the Market. Thanks for being here again.
1:01.6	Thanks so much for having me, Dave. Well, I'm excited to talk to you, you and your team do such
1:05.5	great research at Redfin. I'm hoping you could help us all by starting with just an overview of the housing
1:13.3	market as we entered 2025, at least as you and your team see it. Sure, absolutely. So coming
1:19.1	into 2025, I would say that the housing market is a little bit sluggish so far. I think the main
1:25.9	challenge really is that mortgage rates are sitting just above
1:29.7	7%. So we are starting the year with pretty high mortgage rates, just a little bit higher than
1:35.2	where we were a year ago. The other thing that's kind of holding the market back right now is that
1:39.4	it's, you know, we were kind of seeing a lot of extreme weather patterns across the country, right?
1:43.6	Obviously, we have these wildfires in California.
1:46.0	We have extremely cold weather and like large parts of the country that don't really see that kind of weather very often.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BiggerPockets, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BiggerPockets and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.