Redfin stock rises as mortgage rates continue to slide for second straight week

Yahoo Finance Live discusses the rise of Redfin shares as mortgage rates fall for the last two weeks.

Video transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: My play is Redfin. That's a trending ticker on Yahoo Finance. Shares of the online real estate platform and brokerage surging today on mortgage rates, heading in the opposite direction, the average 30-year fixed falling to 6.42%. The week ending March 23, that's down from 6.6% a week prior, according to Freddie Mac. Said their chief economist, Sam Khater, quote, "Mortgage rates continue to slide down as financial market concerns came to the fore over the last two weeks."

Now, for a little context on the rates, well down from north of 7-plus in mid-November, but up dramatically from 4.42% one year ago. Redfin shares recovering from a rough 2022. They are up almost 8% today, and up 100% this year. They were up 10% earlier in the day. You can see how they've fallen a little bit towards the close.

But what we've seen is, week to week, these types of mortgage-rate moves are spurring activity, because there's so many people sitting on the sidelines waiting for any type of momentum to get back engaged that it tends to move the real estate market quickly.

SEANA SMITH: It does tend to move. We've seen that reflected in applications. I think the big problem, though, holding back the real estate market is listings, is the inventory issue. Because, still, according to Redfin, their latest read, the February numbers, listings or inventory levels are at the lowest level that they've been since the start of the pandemic.

So, many sellers are still not listing their house. What's going to get them there is the big question, a lot of them locked into those lower mortgage rates that we saw during the pandemic. So we'll see. Obviously, a reduction in mortgage rates, good news here for potential buyers. But it's the available homes that's also an issue.

- Yeah, I was looking at-- when thinking about this-- looking at some of that data from the Census Bureau in terms of building, though, right? And you're starting to see that curve come up a little bit. Building was up almost-- buildings were up almost 14% in February, and then housing starts were up almost 10% in February as well. So you had that coming down for a while, leveling out, now starting to turn up.

And you wonder, those people aren't going to sell their homes right away, but how that starts to, sort of, maybe get the market back restarted, right, kick-started.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah. We're at 2 and 1/2 million about in terms of inventory. A healthy market has about 4 million in this case. So yeah, we're well short--

SEANA SMITH: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVE BRIGGS: --of a healthy market.