Buyers are simply saying no to overpaying for boomers 50 year old 30% or more overpriced homes.
Mortgage rates arenโt helping, but more than anything is the fact that the homes are just not worth the asking price.
Zillow has sellers living in fantasyland.
The United States housing market has officially been in a state of paralysis for well over a year. We are witnessing a historic standoff between buyers who simply cannot afford the current cost of homeownership and sellers who absolutely refuse to capitulate on price. The result is a frozen market, characterized by the lowest transaction volumes in decades and a sudden, dramatic exodus of available inventory. In April, a staggering 5.8% of all active listings were pulled from the market by frustrated sellers the fastest pace of delistings since the global economic shutdown in March 2020. This is not a normal cyclical slowdown; it is a structural logjam. The math for the average consumer is completely broken. While mortgage rates have normalized from a historical perspective, home prices have not. Since the onset of the pandemic, median home prices have skyrocketed by roughly $100,000. When you combine these elevated prices with higher interest rates, surging insurance premiums, and escalating HOA fees, the monthly carrying cost of a home has become entirely detached from the reality of wage growth. Something has to break, and the signals coming from the new administration suggest that the resolution will be engineered through monetary policy, setting the stage for a prolonged period of elevated inflation.