Children ride scooters past a house for sale in Los Angeles. Home sales have slowed as mortgage rates have climbed. Allison Dinner/Getty Images
Allison Dinner/Getty Images
Evan Paul and his wife entered 2022 thinking it would be the year they would finally buy a home.
The couple — both scientists in the biotech industry — were ready to put roots down in Boston.
“We just kind of got to that place in our lives where we were financially very stable, we wanted to start having kids and we wanted to just kind of settle down,” says Paul, 34.
This year did bring them a baby girl, but that home they dreamed of never materialized.
High home prices were the initial insurmountable hurdle. When the Pauls first started their search, low interest rates at the time had unleashed a buying frenzy in Boston, and they were relentlessly outbid.
“There’d be, you know, two dozen other offers and they’d all be $100,000 over asking,” says Paul. “Any any time we tried to wait until the weekend for an open house, it was gone before we could even look at it.”
Then came the Fed’s persistent interest rates hikes. After a few months, with mortgage rates climbing, the Pauls could no longer afford the homes they’d been looking at.
“At first, we started lowering our expectations, looking for even smaller houses and even less ideal locations,” says Paul, who eventually realized that the high mortgage rates were pricing his family out again.
“The anxiety just caught up to me and we just decided to call it quits and hold off.”
Buyers and sellers put plans on ice
The sharp