Why Mortgage Rates Are SKYROCKETING in El Paso !

Why Mortgage Rates Are SKYROCKETING in El Paso !

Hey El Paso, my name is John Peña. This is Alejandro Sosa. And we are here to kind of wrap up 2025, the real estate market and make some 2026 predictions. And let's just jump right into it. Let's put this first graph up on the screen for you. This is kind of a summary of what happened in the country. Okay. So what is the median sales price of a house in the United States?

2025 is $433,214, which is an increase of 0.7%. Which means that typically we're looking for a home to appreciate 2 to 4% every year. And on a normal good year, they do. This year, homes only appreciated on average 0.7%. We didn't even make 1%. Okay. Now, of course, what didn't happen, we didn't see a decrease. All right. That's not a negative number. That's

a positive 0.7, but still it's not that 2 to 4% that we'd like to see. What about the number of homes that were sold in the country? This year was 362,701 homes sold, which is, we're basically down 6.8% compared to last year. Yeah. So this year it was slower than 2024, right? Less houses sold, which is not a big shocker. And why not? Because let's talk about this next one. The

national average of the 30 year fixed mortgage rate. It's 6.2% down from 6.7%. So you got a 0.57% that it actually decreased, which is not very much. No, it basically went from 6.7, dropped down to 6.2. So it's better, right? Of course, more lower mortgage interest rates are better for everybody. So it did improve a little bit, but overall, I mean, the story is that we're in

a buyer's market. And what that means is that the demand for homes is pretty low and the amount of inventory, active homes that are for sale is pretty high. That's what we're seeing in the country. And that's certainly what we're seeing in El Paso. Basically, what would you say the average price of a home in El Paso is? Close to 260,000. So well below that $433,000, which is

still good, which suggests that El Paso is an affordable city for housing. Yes, I do know that we have higher property taxes, which you have to take into account. But affordability really is the overriding theme in all of this. And so we find ourselves, like I said, 2025, very similar to 2024. And quite honestly, I feel like it's very likely that it will be similar to 2026. And

recently, if you take a look at the largest 300 metro areas, cities in the country, 98 out of 300 actually saw home prices come down. OK, what cities, areas are we talking here? Mainly it's going to be the east side. Florida, there's a lot of a lot of movement over there. A lot of homes just dropped in value. Some areas in Texas like Dallas, Austin, some of those markets. But

mainly it's going to be on the east side. Florida, Tampa, all that area is getting pretty beat up with that. Absolutely. West Coast, too. Lots of places in California are seeing price drops. San Francisco. But yeah, Florida is really getting hit hard. Now, keep in mind on that map, you might see a little dot there that you're like, oh, that's El Paso. That's not El Paso. That's actually

Las Cruces, New Mexico, which is 30 minutes away from us. But their prices did come down. And let's now talk about the other 202 metro areas where prices went up. So in the majority of the largest cities in the country, prices did go up, just not that much. So the darker the blue, the more the prices increased, the lighter the color, the less they increased. Now you can see El Paso in there.

And while we're certainly not dark blue, we had pretty modest gains. But what were some of the other areas that had bigger price increases? A little bit of everywhere, but also the majority of those prices are going to be on the east side, the Midwest and then the east side like New York, all that area you can see on the map. There's quite a bit of areas that the prices increase.

Yeah, for sure. Midwest, Chicago, Great Lakes region, the northeast really did well. So yeah. So that's kind of a good picture, I think of, you know, like it's definitely not all doom and gloom. Yeah, prices did go down in some places. But for the majority of bigger cities, prices actually did appreciate minimally, we could say. So if we go back to this first graph,

I'd like to show this one because it shows the average home price over the last five years. And you can see that since COVID, we've definitely had some some pretty significant increases. But we've kind of circled there November 2024, November 2025, the December data isn't out yet. And it's right there. They're pretty much level. Like I said, this year,

0.7 increase. What it shows, though, is that there absolutely was not a housing crisis. There was not well, there is a housing crisis of affordability, but there was not a housing bubble that blew up. There wasn't a market crash, right? Anything like that. People always like to suggest that, oh, there's going to the housing market is going to crash. The housing market is not going to crash,

because the big problem here is that there aren't enough homes, right? So I think something catastrophic would have to happen for there to be a housing bubble. So I don't think we have any fears of that. And with that, let's jump into 2026. predictions for 2026. It's impossible to say because we can't predict what the future is exactly. But I do think there are some key things

that are happening in the broader economy that are likely going to affect the real estate market. Number one, in May, we are going to get a new Fed chair. That Fed chair is going to very, very likely lower the Fed interest rate. Keep in mind that when the federal interest rate lowers, it doesn't mean the mortgage rates come down with it. That's unfortunately not how it works.

The mortgage rates are actually tied more to bonds, specifically the 10 year Treasury. So it's not going to be a just like the Fed chair lowers interest rates, and then all of a sudden, the mortgage rates are low. Unfortunately, it's not going to work like that. It might be that yeah, rates do come down. Another crazy thing that's happening is that the government is

currently printing about $40 billion a month. This is a lot of money that's being printed, made out of the air just created, right, and put into the economy. So it's very unclear what effect that is going to have. And so that then combined with, I'd say some economic uncertainty, we're yet to see how the tariffs play out. Is it good? Is it bad? There's certainly concerns about folks losing

their jobs, whether that's AI or, you know, some of the government stuff that happened. So it's really tricky to predict exactly what's going to happen. But I think it's fair to say that, like I said, next year is going to still kind of be soft, like I would say this year was. We found some other interesting data. What were some of the interesting things we were going to

talk about, too? Well, some of the predictions, the National Association of Realtors is predicting 4% appreciation this coming year, which I think it's a little bit optimistic, to be honest. I think like we were talking about maybe one, two percent. Yeah, one to two percent, maybe. An interesting thing that I found is one out of five homebuyers are first time homebuyers,

which is an historic low. It's only 21 percent. And the average age of a homebuyer is 40 years old. Yeah. Which basically means who's not, unfortunately, buying a lot of houses. Young people, 20, 30 year olds. Yeah. It's just not feasible. No, not feasible for a lot of people. So and especially younger people and especially first time homebuyers. So that doesn't bode well,

all right, for for for anybody. So, again, this this idea that housing is, you know, the American dream. And I know that now that that feels kind of outdated and not necessarily true anymore. But there are still a lot of people that, given the choice, would prefer to own a home, right, rather than rent. So the big problem is affordability. And the solution that's not

going to happen is to build more homes. Right. Since there are this many people that want to buy homes, but only this many homes, if we could build more homes, that would certainly help. But how do you think builders are feeling about building more homes in 2026? Not great. There's a lot of uncertainty with the economy. There's lack of demand,

like you're saying. There's a lot of rising costs, right, with the tariffs, with many different things. Also can have problems finding workers. It's just the builders, we've talked to them. They're not very excited, you know, and optimistic about, yeah, let's build a lot of houses because we're going to get these houses sold. Yeah, for sure. So that's that's

kind of it. I wish we could give more good news. And as real estate agents, we help two types of clients. We help people that buy homes. And if you're in a financially strong position, maybe you have some savings, your credit score is good. You're still gonna be able to buy a home. No problem. One piece of honest advice that I think is important to give is that if these predictions

are right and homes are only going to appreciate a minimal amount, 0.7 percent, 1 percent, 2 percent, then if you buy a home and you don't live in that home for at least three years, five years is better. You're going to lose money when you sell it, OK, because your closing costs when you sell a home are more even than when you buy a home. So just a little piece of honest

advice to hopefully show that we're not just sharks trying to take your money. If you're a buyer and you're going to you don't think you're going to live in a home for at least three years, five years is better. Ten's better. If you don't think you're going to be in that home for at least three years, you probably shouldn't buy a home, quite honestly, because when you go to sell it in

three years, it will not have increased in value enough and you are going to lose money. Yeah, unless you want to do like some investors do. They buy a property or they're here like a lot of military PCS and they basically buy a home. Three years later, they end up renting it. But it's very important to talk about a good real estate agent that tells you where to invest that

money because somebody, if they just want your money, they're going to tell you to buy in-house, but there are strategic locations that it might be worth it to buy a house as an investment property for the future. Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, we do a handful of investors, but the majority of our buyers are just people, families typically. So that's one group of people

that we work with. And so the outlook for them next year is meh. OK, the other type of client that we work with are homeowners who are trying to sell their home. Unfortunately, the outlook for them is also kind of meh, to tell you the truth, because when you list your home, you're just one more home of thousands that make up the active inventory. So your product that you're selling,

your home, there's just not a strong demand for it. And there's a lot of competition. So for us as real estate agents, you know, our honest advice and opinions is that, yeah, if you're a buyer who's flush and doing well and you're going to be here, you know you're moving to El Paso or you've saved up your money in El Paso, you're going to be here for a while.

Yeah, great. Buy a house. 6.2 percent isn't terrible. And if rates go down in the future, you can always refinance. If you're a homeowner, honestly, if you don't have to sell, I wouldn't sell, quite honestly. Now, a lot of you don't have a choice. If you're PCSing to another base, you have a family situation, medical emergencies, whatever it is, some people just have to sell

their home. And yeah, your home is still going to sell, especially if you hire us, a good, reputable, experienced agents. But you just need to be you can't be of the mindset that you're going to somehow make like, you know, top dollar for your home. Right now is not the time when homeowners are making top dollar. Top dollar happens in seller's markets. We're in a buyer's

market. So just some honest advice and opinions, I guess. So with that, we certainly hope that you had a great 2025. It's actually January 1st for us. We're recording this on and we certainly hope that you guys have a great 2026. Just a real quick, we don't brag too much on the channel. What did we recently accomplish with our subscribers? 10,000. 5 years and we finally

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kind of festive holiday spirit, please consider subscribing to the channel. And we really thank all of you for all of your continued support. And we hope that we're providing you guys with value and resources as well. Yeah, we really appreciate you guys watching, commenting, liking the video, subscribing. And obviously we appreciate all the clients that we had

throughout the year. It's been great. Everybody's been great. So even though it's been a little slow, it's been an amazing year. We met many great people, made great connections. So I say overall, I'm very happy and wish everybody the best for next year. Absolutely. Thanks. We'll see you in the next video.