I must confess, I am about a month and half late on sending out my 2023 year end report. If I was someone with lesser integrity I would blame this delay on my newborn but, of course, I would never do such a thing! Anyway I hope you are able to get some nuggets out of this. One part I would definitely check out is a detailed breakdown of how much it costs delaying a home purchase. When we hear that home prices have increased by 8% or 9% rarely do we think that not only will the same house cost 8-9% more but that a prospective client also missed out on 8-9% of equity increase! That is something that is not talked about a lot and can really help some people get off the fence. At the end of the report there is also a brief highlight on some of our programs that can help out first time homebuyers including some grant programs. That’s definitely worth checking out!

Now for a brief market update. We got a mixed data coming out this week, most of it wasn’t great unfortunately. Inflation increased more than expected but retail sales also fell much more than expected which could be a sign of things to come. Less spending by consumers will only help inflation go lower. However anytime inflation is showing an even slight increase it will cause a bit of panic in the market and that is what we are seeing. So far the increase looks to be pretty normal. I think it’s going to take a lot more to take us higher. It is pretty safe to say that any rate cuts by the Fed are going to be pushed to the summer time.