“When I say reset, I’m not looking at a particular specific set of data. What I’m really saying is that we’ve had a time of a red-hot housing market all over the country, where famously houses were selling to the first buyer at 10% above the ask even before seeing the house. That kind of thing. So there was a big imbalance between supply and demand. Houses were going up at an unsustainable fast level. So the deceleration in housing prices that we’re seeing should help to bring prices more closely in line with rents and other housing market fundamentals. That is a good thing. For the longer term what we need is supply and demand to get better aligned so that housing prices go up at a reasonable level and at a reasonable pace and that people can afford houses again. We probably in the housing market have to go through a correction to get back to that place. There are also longer-run issues with the housing market. As you know, it is difficult to find lots now close enough to cities, so builders are having a hard time getting zoning and lots and workers and materials and things like that. But from a business cycle standpoint, this difficult [housing] correction should put the housing market back into better balance,” Powell told reporters on Wednesday.
“Even though the supply of new for-sale listings fell sharply at the beginning of the pandemic, we show that reduction of supply was a minor factor relative to increased demand in explaining the tightening of housing markets over the first year of the pandemic,” wrote the Fed researchers. “Our estimates imply that new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.”
