Jeremy Wacksman

We are absolutely in an affordability crisis in this real estate market.

That's why, as you mentioned earlier, we are seeing such depressed volume of transactions is because it is so hard to buy.

That's a combination of, yes, mortgage rates.

Everyone loves talking about mortgage rates and pre-temporary they were really low and now they've run up.

Although ironically, historically, they're still not nearly as high as they have been in historical times.

The challenge, though, is home prices.

As you said, home prices are up nearly 100% in many markets from pre-pandemic levels, and that's not sustainable.

Incomes aren't rising that fast, so trying to ease that supply-demand imbalance in the real estate market is really the only way to get back to a more normalized housing market.

The way I always like to describe that is, in any given year over the last three, four decades,

About 6 million homes would trade on average, 5.5 to 6 million homes.

So that's, you know, 10, 12 million people are going through this part-time job process of moving.

The last couple of years, it's been 4 million homes.

So we're off 2 million off kind of a normalized market, and it's not really budging.

And affordability is the reason.

No, but they may get more comfortable with a 5% mortgage.

You ask them three years ago, what rate would you have to see?

And they say three.

Now three or four years go by and there's reasons people want to move that they've been putting off.

And now they might say four or at some point they'll say five.

So the pent up demand and rates easing will eventually converge and you'll start to see folks get unstuck from their mortgage more often.