(The Epoch Times)—As of the week ending July 19, homes are sitting on the market for eight days longer, compared to a year ago, as buyers remain on the sidelines, according to a July 24 Weekly Housing Trends report on the real estate listings website Realtor.
The median time homes sat on the market hit 58 days nationally, which happened amid active inventory jumping nearly 25 percent year-over-year, the 89th consecutive week of annual gains.
“There were more than 1 million homes for sale again last week, marking the 11th week in a row over the threshold, and the highest inventory level since November 2019,” the report said.
Despite more inventory and choices for buyers, high home costs kept them at bay, it added.
“The lack of significant buyer response to substantial gains in for-sale inventory has pushed many sellers to reduce prices. The price reduction share reached roughly 1 in 5 homes in June, the highest June share in the data’s history.”
The report noted high mortgage rates as one of the reasons why many buyers are unable to take advantage of the current situation.
The weekly average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has remained above the 6 percent level since mid-September 2022, according to data from Freddie Mac. Since the beginning of this year, rates have remained above 6.5 percent every single week.
Meanwhile, the median sales price of new homes sold in the United States was $401,800 in June, up from $325,500 five years ago, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Since October 2021, the price has mostly remained above the $400,000 level.
This persistence in elevated home prices and mortgage rates creates an extremely difficult affordability challenge for prospective homebuyers.
In a July 17 post, the National Association of Realtors predicted that if the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates were to drop to 6 percent, then around 5.5 million more households would find the median-priced home affordable.
If rates were to hit this level, around 10 percent of these households are expected to buy homes within 12 to 18 months, the association said. At present, the mortgage rate stands at 6.74 percent.
Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at real estate data company Bright MLS, said in a July 24 commentary that mortgage rates are “not going to be anywhere close to hitting 6 percent this year.”
She suggested that the Federal Reserve may not bring down its benchmark interest rates in the near term, which would provide support for retaining mortgage rate levels.
The Fed’s interest rate has remained unchanged in a range of 4.25 to 4.5 percent since last year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has also given no indication that any rate cut is on the horizon.
In addition to rates, other factors are also creating sluggishness in the housing market, Sturtevant said.
“In a recent survey conducted by Bright MLS, we found that compared to a year ago, fewer buyers are holding back because of high mortgage rates. A growing share cited other financial issues and general economic uncertainty as the reasons they are not buying this year,” she wrote.
“So while 6 percent might seem to be a magic number for the housing market, there are a lot of other factors that are driving home buying and selling decisions in this shifting market.”
Meanwhile, buyers stand to gain from the current buyer-seller dynamics in the market, real estate brokerage Redfin said in a June 16 statement.
Home sellers are now outnumbering buyers, with many willing to negotiate and offer concessions, it said, adding that some sellers may also be willing to accept lower down-payments.
“The buyers who are moving forward today are being very careful with their finances because, with housing costs near record highs, they’re typically spending a big portion of their paycheck to buy a home,” said Fernanda Kriese, a Redfin Premier agent in Las Vegas.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
