Americans’ confidence in the housing market at highest level in 2 years
Fannie Mae released a recent housing market survey that measures how confident potential homebuyers are. According to metrics taken in April 2023, the gauge of housing sentiment jumped 5.5 points to an overall score of 66.8. That’s the highest level since May 2022, and the largest monthly gain in two years.
The boost was attributed to increased expectations that mortgage rates would soften in the next 12 months.
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San Francisco Bay Area Housing Market Starts to Cool
While the average price of a home in the San Francisco metro area is still elevated compared to the rest of the country, there are signs that the once superhot housing market is cooling off.
The median price of a home in San Francisco or Santa Clara is still over $1.5 million, but it’s down almost 25% from its 2022 peak of over $2 million.
When asked for insights into the Bay Area market, Patrick Carlisle, Compass’s San Francisco senior market analyst, said “So we have this combination of macroeconomic factors that were affecting every place in the country, like interest rates going up and so forth, and then you’ve had these very specific factors like high tech layoffs, the highest home prices in the country, work from home affecting our industries more than others.”
It appears that higher interest rates are spurring layoffs in San Francisco-area tech companies, and that’s helping to soften the housing market. It remains to be seen if this will be a regional trend or start to repeat nationally.
What do King Charles III’s real estate holdings look like?
Now that he’s been coronated and officially wears the crown for the English royal family, King Charles III has also inherited a vast portfolio of wealth that includes impressive real estate holdings.
The majority of his property comes in two portfolios, the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Lancaster. The Crown Estate is worth almost $20 billion and has four separate units: London, Regional, Marine, and Windsor and Rural. The London portion has about 10 million square feet of property in London. The Marine portion includes the entire seabed surrounding the United Kingdom and stretches out for about 12 miles. The Regional category is mostly commercial property, while Rural and Windor have about 200,000 acres of rural estate.
The other portfolio, the Duchy of Lancaster, includes mostly farmland and a few properties in London.
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