Laura Kusisto
speaker
689 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2017
last heard Nov 2023
Laura Kusisto’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, so I think we are always, as you say, we are always happy to see prices rising.
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It's certainly good for existing homeowners.
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But we have this challenge now where we're seeing a lot of buyers being locked out of the market.
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And lenders are responding by relaxing these debt to income ratios, allowing people to take on more debt.
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And there's a logic to it, right?
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Because you have millennials with high levels of student debt, and you have home prices rising, and we want to make homes accessible to people.
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But there's always that concern whenever we see debt levels creeping up that if we have another downturn, if we see home prices fall, that you've got people in a kind of precarious position.
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Certainly if you look at the data about debt-to-income ratios, we're now back up to 2004, 2005 levels.
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And we should be clear, we're still well below 2008 levels, which is when we saw debt really spiral out of control in the housing market.
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But you're seeing it creep back up and creeping back up towards those bubble levels.
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What lenders and what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would say is, this time is different, that they have put in place other safeguards to make sure that people who are getting these very large loans, these loans that are eating up a lot of their income, that these people have maybe very high credit scores, they have loan payments and reserves.
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They're trying to use technology especially to put in place safeguards, and only time will tell if they're strong enough.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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One of the things I worry about is, we're seeing a loosening of lending standards, and are you essentially just creating more demand, not creating more supply, and pouring fuel onto a market where you already are seeing prices climb really quickly because of this lack of supply?
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That's, I think, something that we're also very concerned about, that we're creating more demand, but we're not solving the fundamental problem with the market.
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You know, some of the examples are someone who's self-employed, for example.
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People like that have been having a lot of difficulty getting a loan.
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You probably remember that there were some issues with people not documenting their incomes the last time around.
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And so we've gotten very careful about that.
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But that certainly locks people out of the market in a time when more and more people are working on their own, have their own businesses or freelancing.
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