Nicole Friedman

Given that the March numbers weren't very good, it's really not a good sign for what we can expect in April and even into May.

So this is a pretty bad sign for the rest of the year because spring is such an important time in the housing market.

It's surprising because the March home sales mostly reflect people who are actually out shopping in January and February.

And so what this shows is that even when rates were falling, that just wasn't enough to actually jumpstart home sales activity.

Buyers are kind of still just freaked out about the economy.

They're nervous about the job market.

Next month, when we see...

the April data, that's going to be a bigger indication of what the effect of the war in Iran has been on the housing market because we really saw rates start to rise in March pretty quickly.

So this is a pretty bad sign for the rest of the year because spring is the busiest time for home purchases, home sales, and the National Association of Realtors had been very bullish coming into 2026 and had forecasted a 14% increase in existing home sales this year.

And now they're calling for just a 4% increase.

They're looking at what we saw in the first quarter of the year and saying this just isn't going to be the rebound year that they had hoped for.

If these monthly fees are in the hundreds of dollars a month or even higher, that can really make the difference between a condo being affordable versus, you know, out of reach.

So, homeowner association fees and condo association fees have both...

risen a lot in recent years.

And that's really driven by the cost of property insurance and also the cost of labor and materials.

There's been a big jump in insurance costs following the Surfside condo collapse in 2021 in Florida, which brought a lot more scrutiny toward how safe these buildings are structurally, especially older buildings.

And it's estimated that about one in four households that owns in the United States pays one of these monthly fees.

For condo associations, the median monthly fee last year was $420.

And that's a 29% increase from 2019.

And then for single family associations, the median fee last year is lower.