Two years after Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, voters are heading back to the polls for midterm elections which are largely seen as a referendum on his presidency. When it comes to housing, an issue that remains top of mind for Americans after years of soaring costs, many are likely to feel “frustrated” by how little progress has been made to fix the country’s affordability crisis, experts say. One, something has to change, and mortgage rates would likely have the most immediate impact,” he said.
Lots of would-be buyers who would’ve bought since 2023 are waiting to get into the game.” The sluggishness of the market “leaves the American voter frustrated, and I expect that frustration will guide them,” Berner added. What we’re seeing instead is that it’s part of a much broader frustration about the cost of living,” Pete Carroll, executive vice president of Public Policy and Industry Relations at real estate data and analytics platform Cotality, told Newsweek. Another survey of 1,000 U.S. homeowners conducted by Hometap this month found that 77 percent say that a candidate’s platform to lower homeownership costs would affect their vote.
The state of the housing market as the country approaches the midterms gives us a clear picture of Americans’ frustrations. By the end of last year, most experts predicted that 2026 will bring some improvement in affordability in the U.S. housing market, mainly driven by lower mortgage rates. But “mortgage rates are the main reason that the 2026 housing market has underperformed our expectations,” Berner said.
Rates even got below 6 percent for one week in late February before the conflict in Iran broke out,” he said. Since then, rates have climbed back up above 7 percent. As of October 22, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 7.32 percent, according to Freddie Mac, up from 6.19 percent a year earlier.
As of September, the latest month for which data is available, the existing-home median price for all housing types was $417,500 at the national level, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), up 1.3 percent from a year earlier, when it was $412,300. While home prices are still rising, home sales continue falling. Last month, existing-home sales were down by 2.2 percent year-over-year, while total housing inventory reached 1.60 million units, up 1.9 percent from August and 4.6 percent from September 2025.
More homes are lingering on the market, putting a damper on home price growth, but not enough to stop it and reverse this trend. In the same month, affordability declined in three of the country’s four regions, according to NAR, with the Northeast, the area with the tightest inventory, reporting the biggest decline (-4.5 percent), followed by the Midwest (-3.1 percent), the South (-0.4 percent). Only in the West affordability improved (+1.0 percent).
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