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  • Writer's pictureSheryl Lyons

April 2022 - WILL THE HOUSING MARKET CRASH? - Portland, Oregon & more! 😳🤦‍♀️


Well, we're starting to see the familiar Housing Market concerns, hyperbole, and, let's be honest, clickbait. WILL THE HOUSING MARKET CRASH? WILL THE HOUSING BUBBLE BURST? These questions always appear after a long period of intense growth, as we've experienced since 2019. They're typically triggered by an EVENT like a rapid rise in Mortgage Rates, which we are witnessing. And this is triggering because, even though we knew it was coming, I don't believe anyone expected them to rise so quickly by April 2022.

I'll revisit my Mortgage Rate concerns later in this video. For now, let's address the questions about the Housing Market. We'll start with Housing Inventory, where we take the current monthly Housing Demand and then see how much Housing Supply is available to service that Demand. And in all but NW Portland, there is less than one month's worth of Housing Inventory. And when we compare it to the same time last year, we see the same situation; only NW Portland had over one month of Housing Inventory. The year-on-year percentage change shows that inventory in 7 of the 12 locations has increased, so that may be signaling that the market could be slowing down a little, but given that it's still so low, it's not giving off market crash vibes.

Next, let's look at days-on-market (DOM), the best trend for understanding the speed of a market. Every location has a median days-on-market of either 4 days or 5 days, which means that when you put your house on the market, you can expect to receive and accept an offer in 4 or 5 days. That's insanely fast! When we look at April 2021, we see the same. It's not until we go back to April 2020 that we get our first location with a double-digit days-on-market, and we have to go back to April 2019 to see multiple locations with double-digit days-on-market. So the market would have to slow down a lot to get to April 2019 levels, and that wasn't a bad market or a crash; it was just slower and more balanced.

When you see the combination of very low Housing Inventory and very low DOM, you can almost guarantee that properties are receiving multiple offers, which means buyers are bidding up the prices. Here's the median sold price in April 2022; pretty high prices all around. When we compare to April 2021, we can see that every location has increased, and 8 out of 12 have seen double-digit increases.

So to answer the initial questions,"Will the Housing Market Crash? Will the Housing Bubble Burst?" Right now, the numbers are telling us "NO," and numbers don't lie or deal in hyperbole or clickbait; it's just the straight information directly from the market.


Now circling back to rising Mortgage Rates coupled with our very high home prices, I am concerned with buyers being tempted by the lower initial rates of Adjustable Rate Mortgages. The only downturn we've seen in the past 22 years was primarily due to predatory lending practices. A sizable portion of that was in Adjustable Rate Mortgages, which couldn't be refinanced before the rate adjusted higher. Let's hope we've learned a big lesson from the past and don't let history repeat itself.



Feel free to contact me with any questions.🙋‍♀️Have a great day!

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