Weekly News (Feburary 7, 2024)

Mortgage Interest Rates Review

United Mortgage Nation  2/7/2024

 Federal Fund Rate: 5.25 -5.50%        Prime Rate: 8.25 – 8.50%  

NY Korean Center Opens in Manhattan

Korea Times  2/7/24

모습 드러낸 ＂뉴욕코리아 센터＂

•  As a hub for spreading Korean Wave around the world, New York Korea Center opens on 24th , which is the 2nd Korea Center after the first one in Tokyo, Japan.  
•  It’s been 15 years since Korean Government purchased the lot.  The building is located at 22-126 East 32nd St, NY with 7 story above ground and 2 floor underground.  
• The 33,000 sf facilities have a multi-purpose performance hall with 200 seats, an exhibition room, a Korea Wave experience center, a library, and a classroom, etc.    

Low-rate Mortgages are hard to Snap up

이자률 낮은 어수머블 모기지 교체, 쉽지 않아

WSJ  2/7/24 

• Millions of home buyers can avoid high interest rates by snapping up existing low-rate mortgages—in theory. Doing so in practice is filled with obstacles.
• Loans backed by the FHA and the Dept of VA have provisions allowing them to be transferred from home sellers to buyers, or “assumed.” In other words: Even in a world of 7% mortgage rates, a buyer can get a 3% mortgage if he or she takes someone else’s.
• But buyers and sellers, and people who advise them, say the servicers that process these assumptions are bogging down the process. It can be a lengthy wait just to have an application rejected.

How Assumable mortgages work

WSJ  2/7/24

Banks’ Property Problem Starts Locally

세계적인 상업용 건물의 문제는 미국내에서 발단   

WSJ   2/7/24 

• Why are U.S. commercial real-estate problems rapidly going global? The reasons are actually quite local.  International lenders often have greater exposure to U. S. downtowns and big cities.
• While U.S. regional banks have borne the brunt of investor worries because of their overall large presence in commercial-property lending, they can have a relatively lighter presence in the bigger-city, bigger-building market. Particularly for smaller banks, they tend to be relatively more concentrated in what is known as “owner-occupied” commercial property lending, But the converse might be true for global banks that lend into the U.S., which can gravitate to those population centers.   

Delinquency rate of commercial RE loans at U.S. Banks

WSJ  2/7/24

Rents Drop for the Wealthy 

풍요한 공급에 렌트비 감소 현상

WSJ   2/7/24 

• At penthouse apartments and sprawling single-family homes, property owners are offering big discounts to keep units full. These price cuts follow the largest wave of apartment construction in decades.
• Houses in Austin, Texas, that rented for $5,000 or $8,000 a month now lease for as much as 20% off. In Chicago, some amenity-packed apartment towers with a new-building smell offer months of free rent.
• The surplus of new housing is driving down prices at the top of the market, which is reflected in the nationwide rental figures. Overall, U.S. rents grew by 0.3% in 2023, the slowest rent growth since 2010, according to property data firm Yardi Matrix. Other measures show rents have already started to decline.

Apartment construction in 2024

Home Buyers Are Finding a Wider Inventory

주택 구입자, 좀 더 넓은 재고 찾아…    

WSJ   2/6/24 

• Falling mortgage rates boosted home-shopping activity in January, luring the first wave of opportunistic buyers back to the market after last year’s collapse in home sales.
• A number of home seekers who paused when borrowing rates marched higher last year have resumed their search, real-estate agents say. Real-es-tate showings in the week ended Jan. 31 were up 9.9% from the first week of the year, according to Showing-Time, a unit of Zillow Group.
• Home builders, meanwhile, continue to benefit from the shortage of existing homes on the market. Newly built homes made up about one-third of single-family homes for sale in December, up from a historical norm of 10% to 20%.

Fed Hints Rate Cuts Are Not Imminent

연준, 기준금리 하향 조절은  즉시 필요치 않음을 시사 

WSJ   2/7/24 

• The Fed decided to freeze the rate and signaled it was thinking about when to lower interest rates but hinted a cut wasn’t imminent when it held rates steady at its first policy meeting of the year on Wednesday.     
  
• For most of January, investors in interest-rate futures markets have put a roughly 50% chance on a central bank rate cut at its March 19-20 meeting. But Powell volunteered on Wednesday that a cut then wasn’t expected.
• “I don’t think it’s likely that the committee will reach a level of confidence by the time of the March meeting” to justify a rate cut, “but that’s to be seen,” he said.

SALT limit might be $20,000

부동산 지방세 공제 한도 $20,000 로 상승 가능        

Korea Daily  2/1/24

• Republican Party in the U.S. House Representative reached to an agreement that they want to raise SALT Limit to $20,000 for the married with jointly report from the current limit $10,000. 
• It is known that NY House Representative members pushed to this agreement, but it is not easy to pass the bill in the U.S. Congress, according to The Hill. 

America’s Biggest Bank Believes in Branches

미국 최대 은행, 여전히 지점망에 희망    

WSJ   2/7/24 

• Hundreds of branches at rival banks close each year, and customers are shunning the teller for the mobile app. But at JPMorgan Chase, bricks-and-mortar locations are part of the secret sauce.
• Chase on Tuesday announced plans to continuing the yearslong strategy with 500 new branches in the next three years. The multibillion-dollar investment will fill out cities such as Boston, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C. For context: Only 17 banks have more than 500 branches today. JPMorgan has nearly 5,000.
• JPMorgan aims to put 70% of the U.S. population within a 10-minute drive of a branch. At Bank of America, the goal is 80% of the population within a 15-minute drive.

Chase vs BOA Branches & Deposits

WSJ  2/7/24