With mortgage rates higher than they have been in years, more high-income earners are opting to rent rather than buy.
“I think there are two broad explanations for [the rise in high-income renters],” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University."The first is that households are facing so many constraints that they’re not able to access homeownership. And then the second is there’s actually some shifting in preferences and so they’re choosing to remain renters.
“There’s just not inventory to buy,” said Airgood-Obrycki. “At the same time, we’re also building fewer starter homes for entry-level. They used to be about a third of the market and now they’re down to just about 7% of the market, so the homes we’re building are just larger and more expensive.”