They said the largest generational group buying and selling houses pre-COVID were the Millennials.
Now?
Its the Baby Boomers. They can pay cash so they are immune to the interest rates and they tend to have more equity in their properties so they're in a very advantageous position to take advantage of really bad time for real estate.
I live in Minneapolis. The inventory here has been historically low since Covid hit. Normally we should have around 15K properties for sale in the seven country metro area here. Right now, its closer to about 4,200 which is crazy. A lot of people are not even putting their houses on the market. They find an agent and within days they have several buyers. We've had three families just POOF move out of our neighborhood. No "for sale" sign, no showings, just gone.
Further, not letting the property go to market is just bizarre. It’s saying they think they can’t get a better deal by letting more people bid on it. That’s categorically false unless the seller knows the value of their property is below current market conditions. Being that they’ve probably not transacted much in the current market this is erroneous. Let the property go to market and take in bids over at least a couple weeks.
Any bidder saying their bid evaporates if the property goes to market is not worth believing.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong and there are serious buyers who make true highest offer off market. But that probably signifies something truly and even bizarre - and possibly a tendency towards market failure.
It's not complicated, except those who missed out on the 0% rates are hit the hardest and want to catch a similar boom that isn't coming back.
Those looking to buy a house now feel cheated. The prices are similar to ~2020-2022 but the rates are much higher. The rates being lower than historical average is irelevant for those looking to buy know because the current housing prices are also much higher than historical averages.
Our entire economy is now addicted to cheap money so those who missed out on the cheap money will want it back.