In a previous post, one could surmise that I was trying to gather my thoughts on what to make of the housing market from a personal perspective. The simple math didn’t make sense to me. If interest rates had moved the average price of a mortgage from, say, 3.5% to 7%, how was it possible that the prices of homes I liked were priced at 20-30% more than pre-Covid? This kind of simple thinking is often good as it keeps you out of potential trouble brewing with an uncertain catalyst. As I’ve often preached to myself, true chaos is hard to predict but obvious in retrospect.
However, it’s often useful to not stop there and understand the other side of the proverbial coin. In doing so, it became blatantly obvious that I either didn’t understand or, perhaps more importantly, refused to accept the state of the US housing inventory. I most definitely had a mental block around the idea that I wanted to move to a mountain town pre-Covid, started the process, got derailed by Covid, and the dream was subsequently shared by millions of others like me, pushing pricing for this sort of home to the stratosphere.
Perhaps I’m not old enough to be a stubborn curmudgeon, or a past life as a derivatives trader has stamped mental flexibility as a means of survival, but quickly accepting the facts and moving on enabled us to move forward with life. Life is often a set of compromises, and while we certainly had to make some compromises in light of this unhealthy housing market for buyers, we can move on with a portion of life that had been put on pause for years and enjoy the new place we’ll call home.
