David Leonhardt:
No, it’s not.
And, Geoff, the way you describe it is exactly the way a market should work. It’s just the housing market is a bizarre market in which psychology plays a really big role. And so what a lot of people do is, they say, I’m not willing to accept less than a certain price for their home. Maybe they think about the price they bought it for and they add on the cost of all the repairs and renovations they have done, or maybe it’s a round number.
But we have all done this ourselves, or we have known family members who’ve done it. They have said, well, I’m just not willing to accept less than $350,000 or less than $850,000 or whatever for their house.
And so what they do when they don’t find the demand for housing that they want, when they don’t get the offers that they want, they pull their house off the market and they think, I will put it back on later. And so housing ends up having this really artificial quality in which prices don’t fall to meet reduced demand.
And that’s where we are right now. So, if you’re a would-be homebuyer right now, you kind of have the worst of all worlds. Interest rates have gone way up, but prices haven’t fallen. And so you really have to pay a huge amount of money to buy a home. And that’s exactly why, for most people, again, not forever, but in the short or medium term, renting makes a lot of sense for a lot of people in the Northeast, on the West Coast, in major markets like Atlanta and Dallas and places like that.