Interview with Andrew McBryan

Fewer homes are selling, but mortgage rates remain high.

Prices are still rising.

They're not rising a lot, as Stephen and I just said, but they're rising about existing homes about 2% to about maybe annualized at about 3.98 million homes, which is the slowest rate, believe it or not, in 14 months.

At the same time, inventory, which we want to climb because we didn't have enough inventory, climbed 1.62 million homes higher than 2019, which is good because we didn't have enough inventory.

And that's also hurt us in the sense that when you don't have enough inventory and you have more buyers than you have sellers, then you have prices increase and you have a seller's market.

But the median existing home price, and this is across the country, was still $4.29.

So what do you think is going on? Well, buyers are waiting.

They're waiting, and I think that we all have a magic number, but I kind of think the magic number is they're waiting for the interest rates to go down to about five.

Sellers are waiting.

And neither side seems particularly eager to blink first.

When demand weakens and inventory rises, you would expect prices to fall.

But we were so short of inventory that they're not falling because people are still out there.

There's still more people out there.

A lot of people gave up and are on the sidelines right now, but they're still out there.

And if they said, oh, interest rates are 4.5%, you would see swarms of millions of people.

So transactions have slowed down.

People are saying, well, you know, I'll just wait because as Stephen said, there was an affordability problem.

But prices don't necessarily collapse because sellers aren't desperate enough to accept dramatically low offers.

People often assume that sellers who list the property need to sell it.

Now, Stephen, in your career, in my career, do you know people that put their houses on the market and really didn't care if they sold it or not?

Yeah, a lot of people, we've experienced that.

A lot of people test the market and put the property out at a price that they would consider to accept if they can achieve it.

And it may be not realistic.

So, yeah, there's a lot of people who are out there fishing for the right buyer.

Absolutely.