Americans looking to buy a house are currently facing conditions that make it hard for anyone but the very wealthy to afford buying a home. Elevated home prices combined with mortgage rates that have rebounded from historic mid-pandemic lows to levels last seen in the early 2000s are causing major headaches for would-be home buyers. To make things worse, many Americans had to dip into their savings during the past few years of high inflation, making it very hard to save for a sizeable down payment. Add geopolitical tensions and uncertainty about the impact of AI on the labor market to the mix and renting suddenly seems like a very attractive, or possibly the only feasible option.
The latest results from show that current conditions have really spoiled Americans’ appetite to buy houses. This year’s survey, conducted April 1-15, shows that two thirds of U.S. adults think that now is a bad time to buy a house. While that marks a slight improvement from the last four years thanks in part to a slight moderation in home prices, it's still a complete reversal from pre-pandemic years, when the majority of respondents would say it was a good time to buy a house.
According to Gallup, we're currently seeing the lowest levels of confidence since the question was first asked in 1978. Before 2022, the share of people thinking it was a good time to buy a house had never dropped below 50 percent – not even during or in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis.
