The real estate market continues to get wrecked by the FED rate increases. From a valuation perspective. But most people I would argue don’t care about the price of a house as much as they do about the monthly payment. This is a combination of price and interest rate. So I wanted to create a dataset that shows the average house price with the median sales price. This will tell you what the average person’s monthly mortgage payment is.

So here goes. The current average 30-year mortgage rate is 6.29% as of September 22, 2022.

We can take that and use Google Sheet’s formula to determine the monthly payment. It looks like this.

=-PMT(INT RATE/12,30*12,SALES PRICE)

I’m assuming zero down payment simply to hold this variable constant. What you can see here is the monthly payment currently is $2,728. This actually tops June’s monthly payment of $2,714. This means monthly mortgage payments adjusted for increased interest rates have not actually fallen at all. They are at their highest level ever.

This data is for Arizona specifically.

So while house prices are actually down 20% from their $480,000 median peak. Mortgages are actually higher.

The entire dataset, worksheet, and formulas can be found here.

So where do I think prices go from here?

If you look at the current 1-year average in mortgage payments the amount is $2,353. If we reverse the equation we used above with current rates then houses would need to be $381,00 just to revert back to the 1-year mean. This would mean we would need a 13.6% drop from this month’s current median sales price of $441,125 or a 20% drop from the peak price of $480,000 in May. Remember this is simply to get back to the 1-year average mortgage payment price. Market’s oversell and overshoot to the downside. The psychology of sellers with over 4,000 price cuts a week could mean things will get brutal.

Price cuts last week just went to their highest level in years. This is a horrible sign for things to come in Arizona. But it gets worse…

Active weekly listings are also at their highest level in years. In 2019 there were 18,562 houses for sale. We now exceeded that with 18,605 last week. Meaning there is a huge supply.

We are now 8% off the peak average sales price of $305.97/sq ft. Last week’s average sales price sat at $282.41/sq ft

What I think is more interesting is the average weekly list price is down 20% off its peak. Currently, it sits at $324.73/sq ft with the peak hitting $401.47. With the average sales price per sq ft at $282/sq ft and the average list price at $324/ sq ft there is a huge disconnect between people listing their houses for sale and what they are actually selling for. The average seller has to reduce their price by 13%. This is sure to get worse once the FED’s latest rate increases from last week take hold.

The listing success rate hasn’t been this low since 2014. Two more percentage points and we’re back to 2011 levels.

It appears a lot of sellers who “don’t need to sell” have just given up trying.