Crisis! Too many homes for sale. Last year’s crisis: not enough homes for sale.

Photo above - that cute little house used in "The Truman Show" is a real 2,100 foot home in Florida. It's listed at $2,417,700 - over $1,200 per square foot. It previously sold for $60 a square foot a couple of decades ago. A 2,000 percent profit?

Evidently Fed Chairman Powell’s rate hikes are finally having an effect. According to the link below, there are 500,000 more homes for sale than there are buyers. And it’s a crisis . . . but only if you expected to win the lottery when selling your 30-year-old “nothing special” home. No, boomers, updating your bathroom and kitchen with new fixtures doesn’t make it special.

Don’t ask me how Redfin – the company which the Moneywise reporter relied on exclusively for her content – came up with these numbers. 1.9 million homes for sale – okay, that could be right. But only if you pretend there aren’t thousands of homes for sale on secret lists, for private showings, with no front yard signs. But how did Redfin come up with their 1.5 million buyers number? If you want more buyers, reduce your price. Redfin predicts prices may drop 1% this year. Maybe.

Despite all the gloom and doom, Redfin reporter Veronika Vevonski (a real person, not AI) urges readers not to delay a moment longer. List your house immediately. Even if the housing market is already flooded. And lower your price expectations.

All this prattle might be helpful if the Fed cuts rates later this year, as people have been predicting. Predicting for a year at least. Will 50 points (1/2 of 1%) cause hundreds of thousands new buyers to appear? It might, but big banks’ mortgage departments have been laying off workers for some time now, so don’t expect your application to receive white glove treatment. In fact, if the Fed cuts rates 50 basis points, is there any reason banks would match this with lower mortgage rates? New applicants will probably have worse FICO scores and smaller down payments. Evictions and foreclosures are already ticking up, but they are nowhere near the astronomical level of 2.23% in 2010. That's when zero-down liar-loans with punitive adjustable rates were hawked to us as the golden ticket.

Hey - turns out they were right. If you survived the foreclosure tsunami, you maybe did strike it rich. Congrats!

It was refreshing in this article to see the ONE example of a price reduction which a seller was forced to accept. Originally listed for $3.5 million in 2021, that California home finally sold last month for $1.99 million. No details about square footage, nearby earthquake fault lines, brush fire adjacency, or property tax and insurance rate hikes. Getting rid of this house may have been a dream come true for the original owners.

Here in Florida, I continue to research my options to become a borrower and leave the ranks of peasants and tenants behind. But once I began clicking on home listings for sale, I got spammed with places that have been on the market for months, or years. There were 2 in my email this morning: A 1,700-foot home for $129,000. Previously occupied by tenants. The inside looks like an abortive renovation, and it needs EVERYTHING. My other option was an 800 foot pristine condo, at $250,000. I don’t need any more listings like these, Redfin. They’re your problem, not mine.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

US housing market now has 500K more sellers than buyers — and it’s leading to a shift in the balance of power

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/31-Natchez-St_Santa-Rosa-Beach_FL_32459_M65607-24213?