 |
|
|
|||||
Home ownership is receding further out of reach for most Americans as elevated mortgage rates and rising prices stretch the limits of what buyers can afford.A homebuyer now needs to earn at least $114,000 a year to afford a $431,250 home the national median listing price in April, according to data released Thursday by Realtor.comThe analysis assumes that a homebuyer will make a 20% down payment, finance the rest of the purchase with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, and that the buyer’s housing costs won’t exceed 30% of their gross monthly income an often-used barometer of housing affordability.Based off the latest U.S. median home listing price, homebuyers need to earn $47,000 more a year to afford a home than they would have just six years ago. Back then, the median U.S. home listing price was $314,950, and the average rate on a 30-year mortgage hovered around 4.1%. This week, the rate averaged 6.76%.The annual income required to afford a median-priced U.S. home first crossed into the six figures in May 2022 and hasn’t dropped below that level since. Median household income was about $80,600 annually in 2023, according to the U.S. Census bureau.In several metro areas, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston, the annual income needed to afford a median-priced home tops $200,000. In San Jose, it’s more than $370,000.Rock-bottom mortgage rates turbocharged the housing market during the pandemic, fueling bidding wars for homes that pushed up sale prices sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars above a seller initial asking price. U.S. home prices soared more than 50% between 2019 and 2024.The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump since 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from their pandemic-era lows. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. In March, they posted their largest monthly drop since November 2022.It’s not all bad news for prospective homebuyers.Home prices are rising much more slowly than during the pandemic housing market frenzy. The national median sales price of a previously occupied U.S. home rose 2.7% in March from a year earlier to $403,700, an all-time high for March, but the smallest annual increase since August.In April, the median price of a home listed for sale rose only 0.3% from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com.Buyers who can afford current mortgage rates have a wider selection of properties now than a year ago.Active listings a tally that encompasses all homes on the market except those pending a finalized sale surged 30.6% last month from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com. Home listings jumped between 67.6% and 70.1% in San Diego, San Jose and Washington D.C.As properties take longer to sell, more sellers are reducing their asking price. Some 18% of listings had their price reduced last month, according to Realtor.com.“Sellers are becoming more flexible on pricing, underscored by the price reductions we’re seeing, and while higher mortgage rates are certainly weighing on demand, the silver lining is that the market is starting to rebalance,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com. “This could create opportunities for buyers who are prepared.” Alex Veiga, AP Business Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
European Union privacy watchdogs fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video-sharing app’s data transfers to China breached strict data privacy rules in the EU.Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and it ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months.The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.“TikTok failed to verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of (European) users, remotely accessed by staff in China, was afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU,” Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement.TikTok said it disagreed with the decision and plans to appeal.The company said in a blog post that the decision focuses on a “select period” ending in May 2023, before it embarked on a data localization project called Project Clover that involved building three data centers in Europe.“The facts are that Project Clover has some of the most stringent data protections anywhere in the industry, including unprecedented independent oversight by NCC Group, a leading European cybersecurity firm,” said Christine Grahn, TikTok’s European head of public policy and government relations. “The decision fails to fully consider these considerable data security measures.”TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance is based in China, has been under scrutiny in Europe over how it handles personal information of its users amid concerns from Western officials that it poses a security risk over user data sent to China. In 2023, the Irish watchdog also fined the company hundreds of millions of euros in a separate child privacy investigation.The Irish watchdog said its investigation found that TikTok failed to address “potential access by Chinese authorities” to European users’ personal data under Chinese laws on anti-terrorism, counter-espionage, cybersecurity and national intelligence that were identified as “materially diverging” from EU standards.Grahn said TikTok has “has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them.”Under the EU rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, European user data can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection.Grahn said TikTok strongly disagreed with the Irish regulator’s argument that it didn’t carry out “necessary assessments” for data transfers, saying it sought advice from law firms and experts. She said TikTok was being “singled out” even though it uses the “same legal mechanisms” that thousands of other companies in Europe does and its approach is “in line” with EU rules.The investigation, which opened in September 2021, also found that TikTok’s privacy policy at the time did not name third countries, including China, where user data was transferred. The watchdog said the policy, which has since been updated, failed to explain that data processing involved “remote access to personal data stored in Singapore and the United States by personnel based in China.”TikTok faces further scrutiny from the Irish regulator, which said that the company had provided inaccurate information to throughout the inquiry by saying that it didn’t store European user data on Chinese servers. It wasn’t until April that it informed the regulator that it discovered in February that some data had in fact been stored on Chinese servers.Doyle said that the watchdog is taking the recent developments “very seriously” and “considering what further regulatory action may be warranted.” Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Apple shares fell nearly 3% in premarket trade on Friday after the iPhone maker trimmed its share buyback program and CEO Tim Cook warned of additional tariff-related costs of about $900 million this quarter amid a raging Sino-U.S. trade war. The Cupertino, California-based company that makes over 90% of its products in China said it plans to shift production of iPhones to India to minimize the impact of President Donald Trump’s trade war. “It looks like Apple is progressing faster than expected with its move to shift production of US phones into the region (India),” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Analysts at Wedbush echoed this view, referring to India as Apple’s “life raft supply chain” as the company navigates through tariff turbulence. Cook outlined how Apple has started to build up a stockpile of products so that the majority of its devices sold in the U.S. this quarter will not come from China. Tim Cook did his best to reassure investors on last nights earnings call, but many likely came away still wanting more clarity about what lies beyond June,” Matt said, adding that the $900 million hit to profit turned out to be smaller than many had feared. Apple, which has been grappling with increased competition in key market China from rivals like Huawei due to slower rollouts of AI features, was already in troubled waters before the tariffs hit. “The question for investors is what can replace China for Apple? This is not an easy question to answer and could threaten the long-term trajectory of Apples growth plan,” said Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB. Despite electronics being exempted from U.S. President Donald Trump’s slew of import tariffs so far, Washington has signaled that some levies could be imposed in the coming weeks. Big Tech peers Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta Platforms beat quarterly estimates aided by artificial intelligence, while Amazon.com’s cloud revenue growth fell short of revenue expectations. These results were in stark contrast to dour forecasts from consumer electronics companies that are more exposed to tightening consumer budgetschipmakers Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, and Intel. Apple shares lost about 15% so far this year. That compares with a 2.3% fall in Meta, and a nearly 1% rise in Microsoft. Apple’s 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio is 27.63, compared with Microsoft’s 28.64 and Meta’s 21.48. (This story has been corrected to add ‘premarket trade’ in paragraph 1) Kanchana Chakravarty and Lucy Raitano, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||