The housing market is in a holding pattern, said Doug Duncan, vice president and chief economist at Fannie Mae, in an interview with Inman News at last year’s San Francisco Real Estate Connect.
“There’s no doubt that mortgage underwriting standards and credit conditions have tightened significantly since the days before the house-price bubble,” noted Duncan. Although, he said, tightening has ceased.
The market is holding steady at the moment, but will slowly loosen as housing prices stabilize, noted Duncan, who also predicted that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, which now sit well below their long-term average, sometime in 2012.
