You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home
Should you even try to buy a house right now? Asking real-estate agents, economists, and potential homebuyers that question is likely to elicit something between a whimper and a scream these days. “It never feels like a great time to buy a house,” Danielle Hale, the chief economist at Realtor.com, told me. “You’re committing yourself to paying this enormous mortgage over a really long period of time.” But, she said, something that is always “a little bit scary” is “particularly scary” right now. Many Americans seem to share that sentiment: Half as many home sales occurred this past July as in the same month two years ago.
A confluence of factors, some structural and some cyclical, have aligned to make the current housing market among the most challenging, expensive, and stressful ones in recent years. A few
