A little over a month ago, when mortgage rates were still "only" 5% we shared several devastating anecdotes from real estate agents and industry execs who validated our worst fears: US housing was imploding... fast, with subsequent observations only confirming this dire conclusion about the state of the most popular asset class among the US middle class.

Fast forward to this week when things have gone from worse to catastrophic, because with 30Y mortgage rates soaring at the fastest pace on record to above 6%, or levels last seen just before the housing bubble burst...

.... sending the average mortgage payment on a median mortgage up by almost $800 in just the past 6 months...

making housing the most unaffordable in history...

... sending new home sales plunging at the fastest pace since the peak of the covid crisis after the longest negative streak since 2010...

... and homebuyer sentiment imploding to the lowest level in generations...

Which brings us to the latest housing market summaries from real-estate brokerage RedFin, which are not pretty.

The first shows that after the period of unprecedented gains for home prices and a uniformlly sellers market, has flipped, and according to Redfin, the highest share of sellers on record dropped their list price during the four weeks ending June 12 as mortgage rates shot up to levels not seen since 2008, collapsing the pool of potential home shoppers.

In the Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, metro areas, the share of new-construction offerings with price cuts has quadrupled from a year earlier, according to Redfin. They tripled in Phoenix and doubled in the Tampa, Florida, region.

"We are in a different place — the builder can no longer name a price and say, 'pay it or move along," said Nicole Freer, a Houston agent who has slashed prices by $2,000 to $20,000 on homes she lists for builders. "They're telling us: 'Our managers have allowed us to negotiate again.'"