The important context for year-over-year data

HousingWire

On today’s episode, Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler talks with Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami about existing home sales and the importance of context with year-over-year data in the Housing Market Tracker.  Related to this episode:  Housing year-over-year comps need context for the rest of 2026 https://www.housingwire.com/articles/housing-year-over-year-comps-need-context-for-the-rest-of-2026/  HousingWire | YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXDD_3y3LvU60vac7eki-6Q  Buy one, get one FREE tickets to the Mortgage Banking Summit on October 1st https://events.housingwire.com/mortgage-banking-summit-2026  More info about HousingWire https://lnk.bio/housingwire  Top 5 Trending:  Florida’s housing market looks shaky. Orlando tells a more complicated story https://www.housingwire.com/articles/floridas-housing-market-looks-shaky-orlando-tells-a-more-complicated-story/  Pulte says FHFA weighing bi-merge, single credit report https://www.housingwire.com/articles/fhfa-bi-merge-credit-report-vantagescore-pulte/  Housing year-over-year comps need context for the rest of 2026 https://www.housingwire.com/articles/housing-year-over-year-comps-need-context-for-the-rest-of-2026/  Commodity inflation is hot, but Fed is still focused on core inflation https://www.housingwire.com/articles/commodity-inflation-is-hot-but-fed-is-still-focused-on-core-inflation/  MBA sues New Jersey over disparate impact rule https://www.housingwire.com/articles/mba-sues-new-jersey-disparate-impact-fair-lending-rule/  Want more from Sarah? Don’t forget to subscribe!  The HousingWire Daily podcast brings the full picture of the most compelling stories in the housing market reported across HousingWire. Each morning, listen to editor in chief Sarah Wheeler talk to leading industry voices and get a deeper look behind the scenes of the top mortgage and real estate.

Transcript

00:10Welcome, everyone. I'm joined today by lead analyst Logan Motoshami to talk about existing

00:15home sales and how to look at the year-over-year data with our tracker. Before we dive in,

00:20here are the top five articles on HousingWire.com. First is Florida's housing market looks shaky,

00:26Orlando tells a more complicated story, followed by Pulte says FHFA weighing buy-merge single credit

00:32report. Then we have the tracker, housing year-over-year comps need context for the rest

00:37of 2026. And Logan's article, Commodity Inflation is Hot, but Fed is still focused on corn inflation.

00:44Finally, we have the NBA sues New Jersey over disparate impact rule. Okay, we're ready to dive

00:51in. Logan, welcome back to the podcast. It is wonderful to be here. And about five minutes

00:56ago, you had both your fingers up and saying, Logan, no long rants. We don't have a lot of

01:02time today. None. Two fingers. I got two fingers today. So it's true because we both have a hard

01:09stop. So I was like, listen, no long rants. You can do short rants, no long rants. I have to

01:12tell

01:13you those things. I know. I know. That's why we call you boss, right? You know, so it is what

01:17it is.

01:18It is. Okay. Let's talk about existing home sales.

01:21So by the time this podcast comes out, existing home sales will be available seven o'clock Pacific

01:28time AM. And one of the things I wanted to talk about with the tracker is this year is much

01:35different

01:35than last year. So the year-over-year comps are going to need a little bit more context. Where last

01:41year, what did you say? The housing market, when did it shift?

01:44Mid-June, 2025.

01:46Mid-June. Okay. Mid-June, 2025. Because the 10-year yield was going lower. The spreads were

01:50going to get better. Mortgage rates were going to break under 6.64. And the supply and demand

01:55equilibrium was going to change. So that worked all the way up to, shocking enough, if you look at

02:02our tracker data, mid-May, when mortgage rates actually hit 6.65, we started to see a little bit

02:10of a difference. But what I wanted to show in that article is in the previous few years, what would

02:17happen is rates would start off the year higher. Existing home sales would be trending lower.

02:23And then all of a sudden, the rates would go lower in the second half of 2020 or the second

02:29half of

02:29the year. And then the housing demand would pick up and we go nowhere. Here, it's a much different

02:34story because we had growth. And if you look at our tracker data, how we do our weekly pending home

02:41sales, I remember we had to adjust to the holidays and to the snowstorm. We were showing positive year

02:46over year and purchase application data, even double digits. Weekly pending home sales were up.

02:52That was like mid-February to mid-May. And then mid-May, the conflict took rates up to 6.65,

02:58the 10-year yield. We saw one week of really a big hit to the weekly demand. And then we

03:06had a break,

03:07right? We had that deal with Iran. And then the 10-year yield went lower. Housing demand started to

03:13pick it up. But now we are above 6.64 with duration. And all housing data with rates need duration.

03:21So

03:21the purpose of this is that the year-over-year inventory growth will be easier to show year-over-year

03:28positive data on inventory. But it's going to be extremely hard to show positive year-over-year

03:35demand data because of the year-over-year comps dealing with a lower rate environment last year

03:40compared to a higher rate environment with duration, which we have not really dealt with

03:48since 2023 when the 10-year yield went up and Fed policy got very aggressive and we had 8%

03:56rates. Of

03:56course, mortgage spreads are much better now. But it's been a while since we've had this kind of

04:03higher rate environment into the second half of 2026.

04:07One of the reasons this is so important is because on the regular, daily, I get served terrible content

04:14from all sorts of places on social media where people are taking the data that you explain about

04:20what's happening and they take that same data and, you know, it's a crash, it's this, you should make

04:25these decisions. So we want our audience, professionals, to know, but we also want them to know how to explain

04:30it to their consumers because I literally get served this stuff. I don't follow any of these people. But it

04:36doesn't matter. I still hear all the bad takes.

04:39If it bleeds, it leads. Doom porn sells. And unfortunately, some individuals in this country

04:47will live as American citizens, but will die as doom porn specialists. Not the best look, man. Not

04:54the best look of the 21st century. So what do you think the bad take is here? What is the

04:59bad take

04:59we're going to see from this data? I don't think there's any, I don't think, I think this is a

05:04much

05:04more sophisticated discussion. I think, I think the people who do porn all the time will make up

05:10anything. I just, we just have enough data now to where we can show that existing home sales should

05:15be trending lower. We've had every single year we've had existing home sales fall below 4 million,

05:21the monthly print. And it shouldn't be any difference. I know, I think the NAR just has a

05:26slight month to month decline, but that would be the normal flow of data. It's just here in 2026,

05:33we've had the lowest rate curve, but this was actually always kind of a rising rate year,

05:39even going back to late February. Housing data held up as good as it possibly could up until 6.65

05:45and then the sales demand curve lower. But now that everyone, because we believe in reading,

05:51you can all see it in the weekend tracker. You could go back into February and all the way to

05:57mid

05:58May. And then you could look at where mortgage rates were and really was like 6.65. And the reason

06:04I do this is I've, I've followed housing the last 15 years. To me, there's, there's almost a slow dance

06:09with the 10 year yield and housing demand where I don't agree with mortgage professionals or realtor

06:15is that there's a swath of people ready to buy, but they're waiting for some kind of rate. Millions

06:22of people buy homes every single year, but the demand curve really gets a little bit better

06:27when the 10 year yield goes lower and it gets a little bit worse when the 10 year yield goes

06:31higher

06:31in the last few years after the fastest sales crash. And just now we have the ability to talk

06:39about this going out that the year over year comps for inventory, where, you know, we talked about

06:44going all the way to mid June, we might even have some negative year over year prints.

06:48That's not going to be the case going out and how to read that properly. Just kind of follow the

06:54weekly tracker, follow weekly pending sales purchase application data. And what we should see is what

07:00we've always seen in the last few years, the flow of data, lower mortgage rates headed towards 6%,

07:05a couple thousand more home sales, higher mortgage rates leading to lower demand gives us slightly below

07:124 million and we go nowhere. And this is why, you know, part of the 2026 forecast was we can

07:19get 237,000

07:20more existing home sales if rates just stay six and a quarter and under, because that's what the data

07:25showed me. And now the year over year comps are going to be different because we've never had a rising

07:31rate environment since 2023. So just kind of teaching people, look at the tracker, read it, go back to

07:38February to May, and you can see the growth there. And then all of a sudden rates get to 6

07:42.4 and 6.5.

07:43Then they went down a little bit, things picked up a little bit. For some reason, it just has worked

07:48this way in the last few years. But when people visually get to see it, then they could explain

07:53what's really going on on a weekly basis, whether it's in your own city or national data, it's more

08:00clear now. And now we're going into the last few months of the year. And then eventually we got to

08:05start prepping for 2027. So I think one of the most interesting things about the tracker is to see

08:11how the inventory interacts with housing demand, right? So as you just said, as rates go up,

08:18demand slows down, inventory usually, you know, increase a little bit. What are we seeing with

08:23inventory in this week? So this is an odd week in itself with harder comps is because Labor Day

08:30last year was a week before. So whenever we have Labor Day, which means the next two weeks of the

08:36tracker is going to be tainted a little bit as well. Total activity typically falls, just like

08:42the holidays, right? People are going on vacation. You're not working with a full deck. So last year

08:46at the time, inventory took a noticeable dive and then it picked up the next week. So the year over

08:51year comps, I mean, it's crazy to think we have harder year over year comps. We had the Labor Day

08:56impact and inventory growth is 4.39%. This is not much really in the big curve is because we're

09:02from, we're working from elevated levels, but unlike other people, I, you know, Mike Simonson and

09:08myself do believe this for some time, higher rates actually create more inventory where we were in

09:152022, we're working for the lowest levels ever recorded history. So now that we're almost kind of

09:21back to what normal is, not for our, for our data, it's a little bit about a million single family

09:25homes for sale during the peak months. The NAR is almost not almost back to a million. They're,

09:30they're more two to 2.5 million. The inventory story gets a little bit different with the supply

09:37demand. Now let's say home sales really crashed again, right? So supply would have actually a

09:43better environment to go up higher. But when you're doing this tight back and forth stuff for now,

09:49four years that everyone gets to visually see, but we were working from such extreme low levels

09:55that now that we're in multi-year highs, the growth rate just isn't as fast as some people

10:01would have thought. And of course there's places like Florida's inventory still down year over

10:05year noticeably, but they were working from an elevated level. So other places are picking up

10:09while other places are, are, are not so much. So this way everyone gets to see the visuals

10:15because then it keeps everyone in line to what's happening, right? We want to stay away from the noise,

10:19keep it in line. And this is how we move forward with the data because our weekly sales looks out

10:2630 to 60 days before it hits the existing home sales market. So going out for the rest of the

10:31year, home sales should slow from the peak that we had a few months ago. And then we just do

10:35this

10:36back and forth games with a 10 year yield and rates. It's just this year that the data is a

10:41little

10:41bit more stable than in the previous years, both on sales and both on inventory.

10:47So one of the other data points that we see hit, uh, that, that might react to demand besides

10:51pending sales, which you've already talked about is, um, is the price cut percentage, right? The

10:57number of homes that take the percentage of homes that take a price cut before they sell

11:01normal is like 33 and a third percent. Where are we this last week?

11:06We are a smidge higher than last year. Now this year, one of the reasons why I believe my forecast

11:12so far for national prices to be down 0.62% was that the lower rates actually gave a little

11:19bit of better national pricing curve, but higher rates have now taken that, uh, price

11:24cut percentage, which was just down like a one to one and a quarter percent on a year. We're

11:28just basically slightly above it. So even with the price cut percentage, there's not a lot

11:33of velocity in that data line either. It's just a very, very slow moving database pool right

11:40now that we're dealing with. And a lot of that is because we're working from, from more elevated

11:45levels to take that next level higher, at least in sales, you need lower rates to take that next

11:50level higher with price cut percentage. You need more inventory and more price cuts. And then new

11:56listings data again, uh, is, is another data line that actually had to work with, uh, uh, labor day

12:02comp. So it looks like it's picked up a little bit more on a year of year basis, but they,

12:06it kind of

12:06averages out. So this is why I love the tracker in this kind of environment because this forces

12:12people to read. And when you read it and then you timeline it all the way out, you could actually

12:17tell the story of 2026, which is the same premise that we've been talking about for years. Housing

12:22data typically only gets really better when rates get below 6.64 and head towards six, the longer it

12:29could stay during six, 6% is better. Now we're seeing that kind of slow down in our pending sales

12:35data. We could see it. It's just not a very, very big move, but it's there for everybody

12:40to see. Well, and of course you always mentioned that, you know, hug a mortgage spread. Mortgage

12:45spreads are one of the things you track in the tracker. You put it there. And last week you

12:49wrote a story about, you know, could mortgage rate, could mortgage spreads get worse? Um, this

12:54is something that's really keeping things under 7% right now. If it was 2023 mortgage rates

12:59would have been 8.06%, you know? So I, you know, now, now that we're trying to teach people

13:06spreads, a lot of people just say, Hey, hug a mortgage spread, hug a mortgage spreads. Because

13:09when you visually show people numbers where we would have been in 2023, 2024, 2025, even over

13:168% in 2023, uh, near 8% in 2024 and over seven and a half percent last year, last

13:24year. And what

13:27typically happens is housing slows down a little bit more when rates get above 7%. So, so I, I do

13:33expect our forward looking data to be correct in terms of eventually hitting the existing news, but

13:37the velocity of the data just isn't very big, but I thought it's good for people. If they really want

13:43to go, go read the tracker. You can see the weekly pending sales data kind of take off February,

13:49February 19th, go all the way to mid, mid May. We saw noticeable growth purchase apps and weeklies,

13:55but then we got to 6.65. And then the data picked up a little bit more and rates went

14:00a little bit

14:00lower, but this is pretty much work now for four years. So you just want to kind of go with

14:06it until

14:06it doesn't right. Uh, uh, the one good thing about this year is that housing did a little bit better

14:12with rates at six and a quarter to six and a half than in the previous years. So, uh, that

14:16that's a

14:17positive thing going forward because home price growth has slowed down, inventory's up, housing gets a

14:22little bit affordable, better affordability on its own. And then we kind of take it from there,

14:26but it's very, very nitty gritty, which I like because then everyone gets to see it. Then you go,

14:31okay, well go back, test this with anybody else's 99% people don't have models or have data to track

14:36in this, in this matter. And then everyone gets a more clear picture of what's going on out there

14:41and what rate levels actually do matter with the housing market. So given that we have been above that

14:47key level for a lot of this year, what is the, you know, what do you think sales are going

14:52to end up

14:52being at the end of the year? We, every single time rates get above six points, the housing data

14:58slows down. This is no different than, than this year, except this year, we haven't had any really

15:05big negative year over year prints yet. So we are trending. We should trend below 4 million

15:10on the existing home sales prints. This means this will be calendar year four of when you adjust it to

15:17the workforce, it would be the lowest existing home sales ever, right? Cause we have so many people,

15:22but the difference now is housing held up a little bit better and affordability got a little bit

15:28better because wages are outpassing home price growth. So there's nothing you can necessarily do

15:34about the conflict or copper prices or anything like that. But what you can see is that unlike

15:402023, which I was not a fan of 2023 had a very similar negative term, but home prices were up

15:486%, which doesn't do anyone any good. This is why this year, I'm very happy with this year. And to

15:54me,

15:54one of the most untold housing benefits in the last five or six years was the inventory growth we saw

16:00in

16:00the first part of 2025. It was really, really healthy inventory growth. As more Americans started listing

16:06their house with low mortgage rates because they weren't ever locked down out there. And those

16:12sellers are buyers and they're waiting for, and most of them got their sales through, but we're

16:19having another year in 2026 where new listings data, new listings data itself in 2026 and 2025 was higher

16:26than it was in 2021 when we had 3% mortgage rates or briefly under 3%. So these are positive

16:33storylines

16:34that you really have to be a nerdy housing person, but that tracker shows it out there.

16:39But same thing as always, whenever rates get above 6.65 with duration, housing data slows down. It's not

16:45a very, very big move, but it slows down like it does every single year post 2022.

16:52Logan, thank you so much for being on. Appreciate it. I know tomorrow we're going to do

16:56the preview of inflation. It's inflation week. You're going to talk about how, you know,

17:01what the Fed is looking at commodities versus core inflation, what to expect for next week. It's

17:06crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I'm writing, if I'm putting up copper charts and, uh, uh, heat oil

17:13charts and, and on oil and diesel charts altogether, the copper prices are at all time high. And then

17:19I just don't like how that oil chart looks to be now, you know, it just, we're getting closer to

17:24midterms and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm worried about the escalation factor pushing up oil prices. And this

17:30is, this is something that the federal reserve is really focused on, but for the most part,

17:33they still want to keep an eye on core inflation and the month to month data will preview that

17:38inflation week tomorrow. Sounds amazing. Thanks, Logan. Talk to you soon.

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