Redfin CEO Predicts Ongoing Struggles for First-Time Buyers

Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate brokerage Redfin, predicts that first-time home buyers will continue to struggle to buy a home in 2019, owing to rising mortgage interest rates and low for-sale inventory.

“There’s so much inventory that’s rate-locked,” Kelman said in an interview with the Associated Press. “The spread between 3.5% and the current mortgage rate, as that widens, it will just be a stronger and stronger incentive for people to hold on to their homes forever. When they want to move, they’re going to rent them out, rather than sell them.”

When asked about the current shortage of affordable housing, Kelman cited a history of economic policy that he views as “a way to defend the wealth of Baby Boomers.”

“People get up in arms about protecting the value of their home and making sure that it increases,” he says. “When the city wants to increase density, everybody living in a single-family home, who is usually between the ages of 40 and 65, absolutely freaks out and prevents that construction. And in some ways that’s just acting as a cartel where the people who hold the good prevent more supply of that good from reaching the market and maintain artificially high prices.”