Election anxiety is stalling the housing market, agents and mortgage lenders say
Real estate agent Crystal Bonin had helped her clients put in several offers on high-end homes around Baton Rouge, La., when all of a sudden, they stopped their search.
The reason? They were worried about the election, and what it might mean for the future of the husband’s IT business.
To hear other industry veterans tell it, stories like Bonin’s are common every presidential election season but are growing more acute in a polarized political environment that has Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump neck and neck in the final week of campaigning. Bonin said outreach texts and calls her office staffers make are being met with requests to follow up after the election.
“People are like, ‘I need to see who wins to know how it’s going to affect me,’ especially my business owners,” said Bonin, who owns her own firm in Zachary, La. “The normal emotion that they have during a home selling or purchase process is already high. Now, there’s fear and anxiety there.”
Thousands of miles away in Lake Oswego, Ore., real estate agent Nik Kulikov of Cascade Hasson Sotheby’s International Realty said buyers are growing more cautious as they try to figure out what a victory for either candidate might mean for interest rates going forward. And he said some first-time homebuyers are waiting to see if Harris’s promise of down-payment assistance comes to fruition if she wins.
“We are definitely seeing some hesitancy,” Kulikov said.
While anecdotes like theirs are abundant, political uncertainty may not have much of an impact on the housing market on a national level. Alex Thomas, a senior research analyst at John Burns Research and Consulting, sees similar stories in the surveys of agents, homebuilders, and consumers that his company conducts.
But when he and another analyst examined 35 years of data about home sales in the five months leading up to elections, they found that the annual seasonal decline in home sales usually wasn’t any worse during election years than in non-election years.
“We just have not seen this borne out in the data at all,” Thomas said.
Read more: First-time homebuyer in 2024: What you need to know
2024: The same, but different
Melissa Cohn, a 42-year veteran of the mortgage market, said elections have always given some buyers pause, but she’s noticed a shift in the past four presidential contests, where expectations about winners began to affect interest rates.
“It seemed that elections were important, but they weren’t this 800-pound gorilla in the room,” said Cohn, the regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage. “I have a group of clients who are sort of business as usual, but a lot of people are just sitting around and wanting to understand what’s going to happen.”
Thomas’s research found only two election cycles — 2000 and 2008 — that saw greater-than-expected drops in home sales, which can likely be explained by recessions.
“The years where you do see the greatest decline in home sales during that time period, it’s much more a story of what’s going on with the economy,” Thomas said.
This year, the economy has been strong, but homebuyers have had a tough time. Existing home sales in September were the lowest since 2010 as buyers confront higher mortgage rates and home prices near all-time highs.
While mortgage rates fell steadily throughout much of the spring and summer, they’ve been on the rise again in recent weeks following a string of hot economic data and — you guessed it — election uncertainty. Real estate transactions typically peak in the summer months before slowing down in the fall and winter.
Read more: When will mortgage rates go down? What experts say about 2025.
Mortgage loan officer Andy Odeh, who runs The Mortgage Bros with his brother, says that by the time clients land at his desk, most are ready to buy regardless of their feelings around the election. He says he tries to stress the importance of an affordable monthly payment to help his clients tune out political noise.
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