Homebuyer affordability dropped for the fifth straight month. Someone built an index to measure this. They published the findings. Imagine waking up and choosing to quantify despair.
Home prices climbed. Mortgage rates climbed. The index fell. This required an index. A whole f*cking index. Three variables that a seventh grader could plot on graph paper now constitute market analysis worth publishing. The real estate industry saw people getting priced out month after month and thought, "We should track this more formally."
Fifth straight month. Not the first month. Not even the third month where you might still catch the trend early. The fifth consecutive month of affordability sliding backward while someone maintained a spreadsheet and called it research. They watched it happen in January. Watched it happen in February. March came and went. April arrived with the same result. May delivered the fifth data point and they decided this warranted a headline.
Mortgage rates went up because they do that. Home prices went up because sellers can read. Affordability went down because math exists. The index captured all of this with scientific precision. Nobody changed their buying decision based on the index. Nobody saw the index and thought, "Finally, data that explains why I'm living with roommates at thirty-seven."
The index showed housing became harder to afford. Harder than last month. Harder than the month before that. Harder than the month before that. A perfect downward trend that could have been summarized as "shit's expensive and getting worse" but instead became a formal economic indicator. Someone maintains this index full-time. That person has a job. That person probably owns a home.
They'll publish next month's reading in thirty days. It will show the sixth straight decline. Then the seventh. The index will keep falling until either prices collapse or they rename it the Homebuyer Suffering Index and apply for a government grant.
Photo by Artful Homes on Unsplash
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