The Quandary of Real Estate in 2024.

I'm David Brancaccio, and just a few minutes we'll find out how many homes got sold in March.

At a time the housing market is more illiquid than is normal with an explanation

here's Drew Mattis chief market strategist at MetLife Investment Management.

What happened was mortgage rates went up very quickly and then people kind of said oh well waited out maybe

mortgage rates would come back down and so you saw a real big decline in the

number of homes being sold both new homes and existing homes and we want to see that

loosening up a little bit.

I mean many parts of this right I mean it's not just well it'll be expensive if I buy

a newer house it's also people who have super cheap low interest mortgages and maybe they want to move or there's a good reason to move but they're like I don't know about the more expensive borrowing.

Well yeah so a lot of people who are current homeowners don't want to move and so it's getting in the

way of those people who don't want to move because they've got the low mortgage rate

but maybe have to move but then the fact that those people aren't actually moving

right out of their out of their maybe their

starter home into a bigger home is kind of clogging up the works for the people who

would like to move out of an apartment into a starter home. So you really want to see

these new home sales begin to pick up because that'll probably mean they're moving from somewhere and that creates you know more housing space for everyone else.

All right, well the prediction is that it will pick up. We'll see if the data actually bears that out. Drew Mattis, he's the chief

market strategist at MetLife Investment Management. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Stock in the social media company, Trump Media and Technology Group is up 7%

now but it's still below $36 a share that's down 29% from its price at

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