This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 13th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

2020 was a wild year for the housing market and things haven't really cooled down.

Skiddish would-be home sellers took their homes off the market.

Interest rates were pushed down and the housing stock that remained often became the subject

of bidding wars.

So is this a housing bubble?

And that now famous housing bubble a decade ago,

was that really a housing bubble?

Cato's Tom Fiery comments.

We've seen so many homes that otherwise would be on the market, houses changing hands, which is my understanding that every new house gives you at least four moves.

People move to buy a new house and then those people have to sell that house and then other people move in order to accommodate that.

So a lot of the churn that we would otherwise see in the housing market, we really haven't seen we didn't see in 2020 and not as much in

2021.

So what what do we what does that tell us?

Well it's making life difficult for people who want to change

you know change their housing either because they've had an addition of a family

member or or maybe a family member has moved out and it's time to downsize or they want to go somewhere else,

maybe someplace with a better job market or better weather, you know something that makes their life, you know, improves their life quality.

And so we've seen, you know, you talked about the decline in housing going on the market.

The Wall Street Journal had a note in an article about a month

ago that from November 2019 to November 2020 housing going on the market was down

...