It's not clear how this resolves
Real estate is cyclical, which means it has its booms and busts, each of which differs slightly from the last. But today’s US housing market is so outside the norm that its strangeness has become the story’s main theme.
Consider:
Numerically speaking, housing used to be driven by young families buying starter houses. But today, the median age of homebuyers is 56.
That’s up from 31 as recently as 1981.
Homebuilding used to be a major part of the real estate market (and the overall economy), but current new home sales are at 1960s levels despite the US population rising by 100+ million in the subsequent six decades.
And even this anemic market requires ever-increasing government intervention. From a recent X post:
To sum up, the US housing market is dominated by aging, increasingly indebted people who are buying fewer houses and missing more payments.
A growing number of houses listed at current prices aren’t selling, and are being pulled off the market (i.e., delisted). The monthly delisting rate is now moving into 2007 housing bust territory.
Homebuilders, meanwhile, are sitting on vast amounts of raw land, so they have to keep building even in the face of a weakening market. As a result, the supply of new homes for sale is spiking. Note the widening “under construction” category.
https://rubino.substack.com/p/the-weirdest-housing-bubble-ever