The Home Buyer’s Quandary: Nobody’s Selling
Many are ready to move but don’t want to lose the low-rate mortgages they locked in a few years ago, crimping the supply of homes and keeping prices high
7 min
Many Americans who want to move are trapped in their homes—locked in by low interest rates they can’t afford to give up.
These “golden handcuffs” are keeping the supply of homes for sale unusually low and making the market more competitive and pricey than some forecasters expected.
The reluctance of homeowners to sell differentiates the current housing market from past downturns and could keep home prices from falling significantly on a national basis, economists say. This could dull the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow inflation by cooling the economy.
Emily and Isaac Naatz of Cottage Grove, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul, had a baby last year and want a bigger place. They have lived for more than four years in their two-bedroom townhouse, and they now want a three- or four-bedroom house with a yard and space for a home office. “You get four people in here…and it feels like a large crowd,” Mr. Naatz said.
But they locked in a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 3.4% in 2021—and don’t want to give that up to take on a new mortgage with a rate about 3 percentage points higher, especially when home prices in their area haven’t come down much.
The type of home they would want to buy would cost them about $1,100 a month more than they currently pay, Mr. Naatz said. “I don’t feel comfortable paying what I still think is an inflated price for a home, and on top of it paying twice the interest rate,” he said.
As of March 31, nearly two-thirds of primary mortgages had an interest rate below 4%, according to mortgage-data firm Black Knight. About 73% of primary mortgages have fixed rates for 30 years, Black Knight data show. The average rate for a new 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.39% in the week ended May 4, according to Freddie Mac.
The mortgage-rate factor is leaving some people in houses that aren’t a good fit, whether it’s a growing family without enough bedrooms or ageing homeowners with too much space, or dissuading people from relocating for jobs or other opportunities. Some people that wanted to sell in 2022 or 2023 shelved their plans.
As current homeowners stay put, “the movement up the ladder is sort of grinding to a halt,” said Sam Khater, chief economist at Freddie Mac. “It’s getting much harder for first-time home buyers to jump into the market because of the lack of supply.”
Half the listings
In April, there were about half as many homes for sale as in April 2019, though there were more listings than in April 2022, when they were near record lows, according to Realtor.com.
The number of homes newly listed on the market in April fell about 21% from a year earlier, an indication that sellers are holding back even during the normally busy spring home-buying season.
The constrained inventory is a key reason why home prices haven’t fallen much, even though higher mortgage rates have pushed many buyers to the sidelines.
The median existing-home sale price in March slid 0.9% from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors. Existing-home sales, meanwhile, fell 22% in March from a year earlier.
It’s a “unique market condition,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “Sales are down and even prices are down in some areas, yet from a buyer’s perspective it’s hard to get that home, because they are competing with other buyers.”
Frenzied bidding wars are still common in parts of the country, especially for moderately priced homes that appeal to first-time home buyers. In Clifton, N.J., a New York City suburb, a two-family house that listed for $449,000 in early April received 120 offers in six days, said Mahmoud Ijbara, the real-estate agent who listed it. The house is under contract for about $150,000 over the asking price, he said.
“The low inventory is what’s driving the prices up,” he said. “A lot of buyers are really panicking right now.”
A healthy housing market has between four and six months of supply at current sales rates, economists say. The existing-home market, which makes up most of the housing market, hit a record low 1.6 months’ supply in January 2022 and stood at 2.6 months’ supply in March of this year, according to NAR. The smaller new-home market is more amply supplied, at a seasonally adjusted 7.6 months in March, according to the Commerce Department.
The shortage of supply in the housing market has been a growing issue for years. Following the subprime-mortgage crisis, many builders went out of business and others sharply cut back on spending and new construction.
The problem worsened starting in 2020, when record-low mortgage rates and a pandemic-driven increase in remote work prompted buyers to rush into the market and snap up primary homes, vacation homes and investment properties. Home builders ramped up construction but struggled to meet demand due to volatile material costs, labor shortages and supply-chain issues.
That sales boom, along with a huge wave of homeowners who refinanced their mortgages, locked in millions of homeowners to low-rate, long-term loans. Among people planning to sell their homes and buy new ones in the next 12 months, about 56% plan to wait for rates to decline, according to a Realtor.com survey conducted in February. (News Corp, parent of The Wall Street Journal, operates Realtor.com.)
The Fed has been working to slow inflation. It raised its benchmark federal-funds rate last week for the 10th time since the start of 2022 but signalled it might be done raising rates for now.
Housing is one of the most rate-sensitive economic sectors, and the housing-market slowdown since early 2022 has been one of the main ways that the Fed’s actions have directly affected consumers.
Even some people who can accept higher mortgage rates are staying put because they are struggling to find something to buy. Julie and Aidan Booth expected to live in their three-bedroom home in East Rutherford, N.J., for about five years when they bought it in late 2019. Since then, they’ve had a second child and both switched to fully remote and hybrid working schedules, prompting them to want more space sooner than they expected.
The family started house hunting at the start of the year. They would be able to afford a higher mortgage rate, Mrs. Booth said, but they are stymied by the lack of supply.
“The last three weeks, there has been nothing new in our town” that met their criteria, she said. “There’s just no inventory.”
Opening for builders
The housing scarcity is good news for home builders, who struggled to find customers for much of 2022 with mortgage rates rising but reported stronger-than-expected demand in the first quarter. Newly built homes made up about one-third of total single-family homes for sale in March, up from a historical norm of 10% to 20%.
“If somebody does want a home at [either higher or lower price points], new construction is where they can find it right now,” said Jessica Hansen, vice president of investor relations and communications at D.R. Horton, the biggest home builder by volume, in an April earnings call.
The current market could also be a boon to remodelling companies. Rachael and Aaron Wyley, who have owned their Sacramento, Calif., house for almost 10 years, have considered moving to another house with space for Mrs. Wyley’s mother. But prices were either too high or mortgage rates too steep. Instead, they are saving up to remodel to add an in-law unit.
“We would break down the math of it and look at what we would put down, on top of how much we would get from the house selling,” Mr. Wyley said. “We’d have enough to make the monthly payments but not much else.”
There will always be homeowners who have to move due to life events like death, divorce or job relocations, and others who don’t view current mortgage rates as an obstacle. Many retirees and remote workers opt to move to cheaper housing markets, where lower prices can offset the effect of higher rates. About 38% of owner-occupied housing units have no mortgage, according to Census Bureau data. And about 27% of March existing-home sales were purchased in cash, according to NAR.
Many homeowners who have lived in their houses for years have also built up equity they can use toward down payments on their next homes, reducing the size of their loans. U.S. homeowners had $270,000 more equity on average in the fourth quarter of 2022 than they did at the start of the pandemic, according to CoreLogic.
How long the mortgage rate lock-in effect will last is hard for economists to say. Mortgage rates have never climbed as quickly as they did in 2022.
As the gap widens between homeowners’ existing mortgage rates and the prevailing rate, moving slows down, according to a March working paper by Julia Fonseca at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lu Liu at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The paper also found homeowners with low locked-in mortgage rates are less likely to relocate for higher-paying jobs.
Ryan and Megan Carrillo bought their first home in Phoenix in 2020 for $320,000, locking in a 2.75% fixed mortgage rate for 30 years.
Last year, after Mr. Carrillo got a higher-paying job, they wanted to upgrade to a nicer house in the $600,000 to $700,000 price range. When they started looking in January 2022, they planned to pay about $3,000 a month for a new house, but they backed out of the market after their expected payments ballooned to more than $4,000 by September.
The Carrillos now plan to stay in their house for about five more years and then turn it into a rental property when they move out of state.
“I’d love to keep it forever and not sell it,” Mr. Carrillo said. His ultra low mortgage rate, he added, is “too good to give up.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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