By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
All the ingredients in the mix for a busy spring home buying season are there. Buyers seeing more inventory. Mortgage rates steady and mortgage applications picking up. But then President Trump announced sweeping tariffs, spreading volatility across markets and pushing consumer confidence lower. So, have tariffs changed the trajectory of the spring home buying season? Here with more, we’ve got senior housing reporter, Claire Boston. Claire, what are we seeing during this time of the year? Supposed to be the most magical time of the year?
00:35 Claire Boston
Right. Right. This is like peak spring home buying season. The name of the game I’m hearing right now is uncertainty. Um if you are a buyer or a seller and you don’t know what’s going to happen with these tariffs, you’re worried about a recession. Uh that is causing some people to just rethink those home buying plans according to people that I’ve been talking to. You know, that doesn’t mean that people are out of the market altogether, but you know, maybe you’re looking for a little bit of a smaller home than you thought if you’re worried about losing your job. And uh, you know, maybe you don’t want to put in that offer on a home now, if you think that prices could drop, you know, say 5% in the coming months. And so it’s really kind of complicating what we thought was going to be a pretty busy spring. You know, mid April still fairly early, early days for the housing market. So we’ll have to see how this goes in the coming weeks.
01:30 Speaker A
Claire, we also got some information today, some new data from Fannie Mae showing expectations for home price growth to actually moderate. What do we know there?
01:41 Claire Boston
Yes. So Fannie Mae runs a quarterly survey of housing experts. And so this is the first quarter survey. It looks at March, which was before these tariffs. They are now expecting home price appreciation of 3.4% in 2025 and 3.3% in 2026. That is down slightly from last quarter where they were expecting 3.8% in 2025. And so, you know, again, it remains to be seen how tariffs are affecting things here. But um, you know, I think this kind of reflects some of the weakness that we’re seeing in parts of the housing market. We’ve talked on the show about Florida and Texas. Um and just a little bit of, you know, that consumer uncertainty right now.
02:36 Speaker A
Claire, excellent breakdown. A lot to continue to track. Uh, I know you got a couple Zillow tabs opened or something.
02:46 Claire Boston
Always.
02:47 Speaker A
Always, always. Yes. Thanks so much.
02:53 Claire Boston
Thank you.