interest rates right now are killing the housing market.

Today we're going to talk about the critical connection between interest rates and the housing crisis that we're seeing across the United States.

Now, for years, we've been in an affordable housing crisis since the Great Recession, really.

There's been a massive shortage of homes. Builders,

of course, have had to, you know, been a little hesitant to build after, right, after what they went

through in 2008, and I don't blame them, getting burned totally in 2008, 2009. A lot of their

funders totally backed out of the deal, and they were left holding the bag. Now, we know that in the

past few years, the prices of everything have risen dramatically. This includes lumber, land, labor, all of it.

It's become very expensive to build a home. And then there are the interest rate problems.

Higher interest rates over the past couple of years have put a massive halt on home sales

across the United States. The rates are not incredibly high on an historical

scale, but they are in comparison what we saw in 2019 and 2020. And when you combine a higher

interest rate with a higher price, of course, this impacts purchasing power. Interest rates are

important and they're an important piece of adding supply to the housing market. More and more people

are choosing to stay in their existing home. This includes families in starter homes, older folks,

with empty nests, and everyone in between. It's been estimated that more than 90% of American homeowners

are locked into rates below 6% right now. So unless rates drop significantly, there are a lot of people that are just

going to sit tight for go selling their homes until they can find a better deal. This, of course,

is creating a giant bottleneck right now in the supply, one that didn't really exist until the

last couple of years. Now, this means trouble for the housing supply. Builders can't afford to build. Would-be first-time

homebuyers cannot afford to buy. And established homeowners cannot afford to upgrade their homes right now.

And all of this, combined with the already existing housing shortage, has created a renter nation

...