While the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate—which hit 7.06% today—has come off last week's 22-year high of 7.49%, housing affordability still remains pressurized. And that spells bad news for mortgage lenders.
“If we're looking at overall industry volume in units, 2023 is as low as it's been since we started tracking units versus dollar volume in 1999,” Marina Walsh, vice president of industry analysis in the Mortgage Bankers Association's research and economics department, tells Fortune. “If you go across a period of over 25 years, this is the absolute lowest in terms of unit volume that we've ever seen.”
