Whoever can subsidize the mortgage captures the buyer in a frozen housing market.
Because individual resale sellers cannot buy down a buyer's loan, production builders with in-house mortgage arms convert affordability subsidies into market share while existing-home inventory piles up at a decade high.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
A headline sales high manufactured by buydowns and falling new-home prices is the subsidy-captures-the-buyer mechanism made visible in the price data itself.
Lennar's in-house financing buys down mortgages to hold volume while individual resale sellers cannot, converting subsidy capacity directly into share.
Builders with in-house mortgage arms convert rate buydowns into share while individual resale sellers cannot subsidize a buyer's loan — the law's mechanism stated nearly verbatim.
The buydown-capacity asymmetry between builder-owned lenders and resale sellers is the law's clearest statement, with 4.9-month resale supply as the evidence of the freezing side.