#housing-market

The Fed sets an overnight rate. Your 30-year mortgage is priced off the 10-year Treasury plus a spread that nobody at the Fed controls. That's why rates have gone UP after cuts, more than once, and why waiting for the Fed is a losing strategy.

Everyone's waiting for rate cuts to fix affordability. They won't. The Fed just penciled in more hikes than cuts for 2026, prices are at all-time highs, and the real problem is a 4-million-home hole that lower rates make worse, not better.

Rate cuts make monthly payments smaller. They do not build houses. The US supply gap grew to 4.03 million homes in 2025 even as the Fed cut 175 basis points, because the shortage lives in permits, labor, and materials, not in the fed funds rate.

Rate lock-in, zoning reform, demographic demand, and CRE bifurcation are all moving at once. Here's how to read the real estate market when the signals are this mixed.