For two years, the consensus held that buyers would stay on the sidelines until rates fell. They didn’t. Borrowing costs remain well above what anyone hoped for, and prices keep reaching new highs. Yet buyers returned to the field anyway. Existing-home sales in 2026 have run ahead of the prior year’s pace despite affordability still stretched thin, which is not the script the wait-for-relief crowd wrote.
Tidy stories about buyer behavior rarely survive the day to day of a working brokerage. The frozen market so many predicted never arrived. It was replaced by a buyer pool that changed its mind about what it was waiting for.
That shift affects the origination side directly, because it changes who walks in the door. The buyer of a year ago o...
