Very few people actually understand what's happening in the housing market right now, and the headline you keep hearing is wrong. We do not have a housing shortage. We have an affordability crisis and a housing mismatch, and those are two very different things.
Here's one number that tells most of the story. The share of 30-year-olds who are both married and own a home has fallen from about 53% in 1950 to roughly 12% today. People aren't hitting those milestones because they can't afford to.
80% can't afford the median home
The National Association of Home Builders estimates that about 80% of households can't afford the median-priced home in this market. The other 20% who could mostly already bought when rates were near 3%. In Jacksonville the median sits around $400,000, so most people are priced out of anything above that. And the homes below it are often on the outskirts, tied to long commutes, or thrown up quickly during the 2020 to 2023 boom and sold at peak prices. The people who bought those are the ones feeling it now.
There are more sellers than buyers
From 2020 to 2023, buyers wildly outnumbered sellers. You couldn't get an offer accepted. The Fed started raising rates in March 2022, and by that fall the gap between buyers and sellers had flipped. Rates stayed high, payments got out of reach, and now sellers outnumber buyers.
A lot of what looks like low inventory is what I call rage-delisting. A seller lists, can't get the number they want, gets angry, and pulls the home off the market instead of adjusting the price. The expired and withdrawn data is climbing fast, and it's happening during what's supposed to be busy season. That's not a shortage. That's pent-up supply hiding just off the market.
New construction is the clearest warning
The bigger story is new construction in the Sun Belt. Builders overbuilt, and to keep sales moving they've leaned on incentives instead of price cuts. Some are buying mortgage rates down by as much as $50,000, taking a buyer from a 6.5% rate to something near 3%. If you have to hand someone $50,000 to make the payment work, the house is overpriced.
Net of those incentives, new-construction prices are down roughly 25% over four years in some areas, back near 2019 levels. Around Jacksonville I'm seeing builder homes moving with $100,000 to $150,000 knocked off in the right pockets. And here's the part that's genuinely unusual: new homes are now selling for less than comparable existing homes. We almost never see that hold for long.
The reason builders protect price to the very end is appraisals. Cut the list price on one home and you reset the comps for the whole community, which drags down every appraisal behind it. So they buy down rates, throw in incentives, and only slash price when they're truly stuck. When they get stuck, it moves fast.
This is a slow correction, not an overnight crash
People want me to call a crash. I don't see one happening overnight. I think we're in a correction that started when the Fed moved in March 2022, and it usually takes six to eight months for a rate change to show up in home sales. What I expect is a long affordability grind, possibly years of flat-to-down prices until wages catch up.
The thing that would break it open is the job market. Right now we're feeling this with basically full employment. If jobs crack, housing cracks with it, because the market is sitting up on stilts.
It's not just houses
There's a wave of luxury multifamily built across the Sun Belt that has swamped the market. As that bridge financing has to roll into permanent debt, a lot of it isn't occupied enough to pencil, and multifamily serious-delinquency rates are already climbing past levels we saw in the last financial crisis, before any crisis has even hit. Rents are coming down about 10% to 20% in a lot of Sun Belt markets. If you invest in single-family or multifamily rentals, pay attention to that.
Meanwhile the consumer is stretched. Credit card delinquencies are rising without job losses, which tells you people are already maxed out. Roughly 6 in 10 parents are now helping their kids buy a home, according to a Veterans United survey, with gifts running from $25,000 to $100,000. That's generational wealth being handed down early, which is a good thing, but it's also a sign of how far affordability has broken.
What this means if you're buying or selling
The honest answer comes down to your time frame. If you're going to stay in the home 10 to 15 years, buy it. You now have real negotiating power. About 46% of sellers are giving concessions, homes are sitting longer, and builders are especially motivated into their October and November year-ends because they want the sales on the books for investors.
If you think you'll sell within three or four years, renting is usually the better math right now. Too many people try to buy and sell inside two years. This isn't the 2020 to 2022 market where that worked.
For sellers, it's simple: price to today, not to 2021. When sellers are realistic, homes sell. When they anchor to a number from the peak, the home sits and eventually gets marked down anyway.
If you want to see the data for yourself, I'm building a database of new-construction communities across Florida, and you can search it by neighborhood on our New Construction pages and dig into the numbers on our market data. If you're buying or selling and want a straight answer for your exact market, reach out and I'll connect you with a top local agent.