Finance
Spring homebuying season brings slightly more optimism as listings continue to rise
The Home Purchase Sentiment Index is up by 2.1% in February. (iStock)
The spring buying season is heating up as more houses are on the market and homebuyers are eager to buy now that the winter frost has settled.
Fannie Mae’s Home Purchase Sentiment Index, which measures home-selling conditions, increased by 2.1 points in February. This is the third consecutive month the index increased.
This increase is largely due to the optimism slowly seeping through the real estate market as selling conditions improve slightly.
“The HPSI increased for the third straight month, continuing its slow but steady rise from the low-level plateau observed through much of 2023; and consumer sentiment toward housing now rests firmly above where it was this time last year,” Fannie Mae Senior Vice President Doug Duncan said.
While the percentage of prospective homebuyers that think it’s a good time to buy has increased to 19%, many buyers are still pessimistic.
This pessimism comes mainly from the state of home prices. About 42% of respondents surveyed in Fannie Mae’s report expect home prices to increase within the next 12 months, up from 37% a year ago.
Potential buyers also aren’t as positive about where mortgage rates stand. The number of survey respondents who think rates will go down in the next 12 months decreased from 36% to 35%.
“A decline in mortgage rates — and the resulting uptick in sentiment — would obviously bode well for the upcoming spring homebuying season,” Duncan said.
“Although affordability will likely remain a significant challenge for buyers, at least until there’s a meaningful addition to net supply.”
Interest rates remain lower than they did at the height of the pandemic, so if you’re ready to take advantage of these lower rates, now may be the time to consider a mortgage. A site like Credible can let you view multiple mortgage lenders and provide you with personalized rates within just minutes, all without impacting your credit.
HOMEBUYERS CONSIDERING PURCHASING TINY HOMES AND FIXER-UPPERS TO COMBAT HIGH HOME PRICES
New construction homes remain popular
New construction became a haven for buyers during the pandemic when fewer listings of existing homes were on the market. New construction remains popular for many buyers. More than half of prospective buyers last year preferred to search for new-build homes, a Zillow study found.
Of the buyers who wanted new construction homes, 42% said they were only interested in new construction. This is an increase of six percentage points from 2022 and up 10 percentage points from 2021.
Home listings in general are up around the country. Listings for all houses increased 3.8% month over month in February, according to Redfin. This is the largest increase in six months.
“The housing market is nothing like it was two years ago during the pandemic homebuying frenzy, but it’s better than it was last year. It’s coming back,” David Palmer, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Seattle, said.
If you think you’re ready to shop around for a home loan, consider using Credible to help you easily compare interest rates from multiple lenders in minutes.
GEN Z MOVERS ARE HEADING TO WARMER CLIMATES, WILLING TO PAY HIGHER HOUSING COSTS: ZILLOW
Mortgage rates are no longer expected to dip below 6% this year
Last month, mortgage rates were predicted to end the year around 5.9%, but 30-year fixed mortgage loans are now expected to hover around 6.4% at year’s end, Fannie Mae estimated in its most recent rates forecast.
The Federal Reserve isn’t cutting rates as aggressively due to better job numbers and higher inflation than expected.
“Hotter-than-expected inflation data and strong payroll numbers are likely to apply more upward pressure to mortgage rates this year than we’d previously forecast, as markets continue to evolve their expectations of future monetary policy,” Doug Duncan said.
“Still, while we don’t expect a dramatic surge in the supply of homes for sale, we do anticipate an increase in the level of market transactions relative to 2023 — even if mortgage rates remain elevated.”
To see what mortgage rates you qualify for based on your current credit score and salary, consider visiting Credible, where you can compare multiple mortgage lenders at once.
HOMEBUYERS GAINED THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS AS MORTGAGE INTEREST RATES FALL: REDFIN
Have a finance-related question, but don’t know who to ask? Email The Credible Money Expert at [email protected] and your question might be answered by Credible in our Money Expert column.
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has invested heavily in its fast-growing international business as growth slows for its China-focused Taobao and Tmall business.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s international arm on Wednesday launched an updated version of its artificial intelligence-powered translation tool that, it says, is better than products offered by Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
That’s based on an assessment of Alibaba International’s new model, Marco MT, by translation benchmark framework Flores, the Chinese company said.
Alibaba’s fast-growing international unit released the AI translation product as an update to one unveiled about a year ago, which it says already has 500,000 merchant users. Sellers based in one country can use the translation tool to create product pages in the language of the target market.
The new version is based only on large language models, allowing it to draw on contextual clues such as culture or industry-specific terms, Kaifu Zhang, vice president of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group and head of the business’ artificial intelligence initiative, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“The idea is that we want this AI tool to help the bottom line of the merchants, because if the merchants are doing well, the platform will be doing well,” he said.
Large language models power artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can also translate text. The models, trained on massive amounts of data, can generate humanlike responses to user prompts.
Alibaba’s translation tool is based on its own model called Qwen. The product supports 15 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Zhang said he expects “substantial demand” for the tool from Europe and the Americas. He also expects emerging markets to be a significant area of use.
When users of Alibaba.com — a site for suppliers to sell to businesses — are categorized by country, developing countries account for about half of the top 20 active AI tool users, Zhang said.
Chinese companies have increasingly looked abroad for growth opportunities, especially e-commerce merchants. PDD Holdings‘ Temu, fast fashion seller Shein and ByteDance’s TikTok are among the recent global market entrants. Many China-based merchants also sell on Amazon.com.
Contextual clues
Since Alibaba launched the first version of its AI translation tool last fall, the company said merchants have used it for more than 100 million product listings. Similar to other AI-based services, the basic pricing charges merchants by the amount of translated text.
Zhang declined to share how much the updated version would cost. He said it was included in some service bundles for merchants wanting simple exposure to overseas users.
His thinking is that contextual translation makes it much more likely that consumers decide to buy. He shared an example in which a colloquial Chinese description for a slipper would have turned off English-speaking consumers if it was only translated literally, without getting at the implied meaning.
“The updated translation engine is going to make Double 11 a better experience for consumers because of more authentic expression,” Zhang said, in reference to the Alibaba-led shopping festival that centers on Nov. 11 each year.
Alibaba’s international business includes platforms such as AliExpress and Lazada, which primarily targets Southeast Asia. The international unit reported sales growth of 32% to $4.03 billion in the quarter ended June from a year ago.
That’s in contrast to a 1% year-on-year drop in sales to $15.6 billion for Alibaba’s main Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business, which has focused on China.
The Taobao app is also popular with consumers in Singapore. In September, the app launched an AI-powered English version for users in the country.
Nomura analysts expect that Alibaba’s international revenue slowed slightly to 29% year-on-year growth in the quarter ended September, while operating losses narrowed, according to an Oct. 10 report. Alibaba has yet to announce when it will release quarterly earnings.
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