Numbers to Know: Global Events Continue to Shape Housing

Oil prices are swinging (again), mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, yet buyers are still showing up. What's driving these trends, and what do they mean for the housing market? Windermere Principal Economist Jeff Tucker breaks it down in the latest Numbers to Know.

The first number to know this month: $78.

That is the price of a barrel of oil as of July 13, and it’s $10 higher than just one week earlier, when it had fallen into the ballpark of its late-February level of $65. The volatility in July just goes to show that improvement on energy costs can quickly be reversed when tensions flare back up and the ceasefire is called into question. That leaves markets of all kinds at the mercy of events in the Middle East.

Which brings me to the second number to know this month: $3.87.

That is the average price of a gallon of gas as of July 12. Gas prices have come down from $4.56 in May, but they haven’t fallen by nearly as much as oil prices did – they’ve only given up less than half of their peak wartime gains. That’s in part because it takes time for the shortages caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to ripple through the supply chain down to finished products like gasoline. And unfortunately, consumer-facing retail prices are usually downward sticky, because retailers have only weak incentives to slash prices even when their input costs drop. That’s a big reason that overall inflation is not expected to crash back down to 2% anytime soon.

Another important figure that has barely come down at all: mortgage rates, at 6.75% on July 13, according to Mortgage News Daily.

Freddie Mac’s weekly survey was a little lower, at 6.49% on July 9, before the ceasefire was called back into question. That’s not JUST due to gas prices remaining elevated, of course – markets are also reacting to hawkish signals from the Federal Reserve, now that they have met and revised upward their expectations for inflation, leading to a new consensus that their next move will be to hike, rather than cut short-term interest rates.

The fourth number to know: 1.103 million.

That is how many active listings were on the market nationally at the end of June, according to Realtor.com. That is just above the 1.083 million active listings from June of last year.

Put another way, active listings were up just 2% year-over-year in June.

That matches last month’s gain, continuing a dramatic slowdown from May of 2025, when inventory was up 32% year-over-year.

And finally, pending listings were up 5% year-over-year again in June.

So even with mortgage rates still elevated, buyer activity is holding up better than we might have expected. It could be that buyers are responding to the higher inventory availability and slightly lower prices of listings in much of the country. If mortgage rates do start to ease later this summer, that could build on this momentum and lead to some measurable sales growth.