Celebrity real estate agent gives reality check on housing: 'We are not going to see prices go down'
One celebrity real estate agent made a gloomy prediction about the health of the U.S. housing market on Wednesday.
"I don't know we will see prices come down," The Agency founder and CEO Mauricio Umansky told FOX Business' Stuart Varney during an interview on "Varney & Co."
"The government has been trying to decrease pricing, as part of the inflation, but the reality is that we have a very low inventory of housing right now... until we can start seeing a higher inventory of housing, we're not going to see prices go down," he added.
Umansky's comments come on the heels of recent data published by S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index that showed home prices climbed to a new record high in June. What's more, buyers are facing high mortgage rates. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell signaled the "time has come" to begin the long-awaited start to the rate-cut cycle during a Jackson Hole, Wyoming, speech last month.
"We have a bunch of owners that are sitting in their homes, sitting on low interest rates," Umansky noted. "Until those interest rates come down, we're not going to see them... and until we don't see an influx and a greater supply, we're not going to see prices go down."
Umansky also noted that even when the Fed lowers interest rates, pent-up demand for housing will keep prices inflated.
Shifting to the 2024 presidential election, Umansky said Vice President Kamala Harris' plan to provide first-time homebuyers $25,000 in down payment assistance will not "do anything good."
In his opinion, the Trump administration "did some great things," including lowering interest rates and putting money into the economy.
"All of a sudden… [we] started to raise interest rates tremendously in order to create, in order to control inflation. But we didn't count on all of these people just not doing anything," Umansky explained.
"It's a new world, it's a new way of doing things, and we've got to look at new ways. We can't just go back to the old ways of controlling inflation and controlling supply and demand."
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