Kate Wood

And one reason why spring is time to list is because people have time to house shop, school's letting out.

It's summer, they'll have time to move and then get settled into a new place before school starts again.

But if most home buyers don't have kids, that timing is probably not that relevant to them.

And, you know, you can say, oh, you know, well, spring home buying season is about the weather warming up and that kind of thing.

But again, back to climate change, weather patterns are very off track all over the country.

So that argument might not hold up either.

So I would definitely agree with what you said about rates and inventory and also what you said earlier about the coming affordability crisis.

It's something that I've been watching.

We have this idea that home affordability is something that's essentially solved once you've bought a home, especially if you have a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, which is the standard in the U.S.

This is the vast majority of home loans.

You've essentially stabilized your housing costs.

And that is true in terms of your principal, how much you borrowed, and your interest rate, right?

But we can't forget about the TI half of our PITI, right?

So principal, interest, taxes, and insurance.

Taxes and insurance are absolutely walloping homeowners in many parts of the country.

Like Holden mentioned, right?

You know, your hurricanes, tornadoes, sort of more one-off disasters, and then just regular stuff like hail getting bigger, hail getting stronger, right?

So Cotality, which is a firm that does real estate data, among other things, found that from 2020 to 2025, average escrow costs, so this is what homeowners are paying into their taxes and insurance, were up 45% on average across the U.S.

Holden mentioned Florida.

Florida often a bellwether for this kind of stuff.