The worst time to sell a home is right now, dire figures show

Redfin's number is the kind of statistic that should stop people in their tracks: fewer active homebuyers in July than at any point since they started counting in 2013. Not during the pandemic. Not during the 2022 rate shock. Now. That's not a slow season, that's a market where the phone has stopped ringing.

The instinct in Washington is to treat this as a Fed problem, something that fixes itself whenever rate cuts finally arrive. But that misses what's actually pricing people out. Home values climbed for years on cheap money and thin inventory, builders sat on their hands after 2008 and never caught back up, and now a starter home in a lot of metro areas costs what a nice house cost a decade ago. Rates matter, but they're compounding a supply problem that predates this Fed by fifteen years.

Sellers are stuck too, and that's the part getting less attention. Plenty of homeowners locked in 3 percent mortgages during Covid have zero incentive to sell and trade up into a 6.5 percent loan, so they're not listing. That freezes the market from both ends. Buyers can't afford what's out there and sellers won't part with what they've got. It's not a standoff anyone designed, but it's the predictable result of years of policy that treated housing like an asset class to be managed rather than a place families actually need to live.

None of this gets fixed by a press release. It gets fixed by building more homes, cutting the permitting delays and zoning restrictions that make new construction take years, and letting rates normalize instead of chasing them up and down with stimulus. Families priced out of their first home don't need sympathy from Washington. They need someone willing to admit the supply side broke this, not just the interest rate.