Matt Brown says he’s seeing the same dynamic play out again and again: A client gets ready to buy, runs the numbers, then decides to spend another year renting.
“Between elevated mortgage rates, insurance quotes that came in far higher than they expected, and a property tax bill that resets to full market value when they buy, the all-in monthly cost pushed them to pause,” the broker associate at William Raveis Luxury Properties tells Realtor.com®.
That decision—to wait—has become the defining choice of the housing market, with transaction levels stuck at or near historic lows and the number of adults delaying household formation and living with their parents at historic highs.
The bipartisan 21st Century Road to Housing Act was supposed to be the nation’s triumphant response. The sweeping package aims to slash the barriers that have kept the market in a structural shortage now estimated at 4.03 million homes, while empowering buyers with new financing options.
President Donald Trump called it “the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country,” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the legislation “will make a real difference in people’s lives.”
But after passing Congress, the bill now hangs in limbo: stuck on the president’s desk, awaiting his signature, a veto, or a Friday deadline to become law without his action.
It’s hard not to see the delay as a metaphor for the broader housing market: relief close enough to see, but too far away to guide a decision that has to be made now. And that’s only sharpened the question hanging over millions of buyers, sellers, and renters: Do they make peace with the costs in front of them—or keep waiting for the housing fix that Washington says is coming?
The paradox of relief
“In such unfavorable conditions, the wisest course of action for any prospective seller is to hold off,” says Kade Thomas, CEO of Cerv Property Solutions.
And the case for patience may have strengthened in recent months. List prices posted their steepest annual decline in nine years in May before falling 2.5% year over year in June. Meanwhile, just over half of outstanding mortgages carry rates of 4% or lower and a whopping 78% have rates below 6%, according to data from Realtor.com.
“The housing market is cyclical, and this slow buyer’s market will not last forever,” Thomas adds. “In fact, with bright spots slowly emerging and promising policy changes on the horizon, the next seller’s market could come as soon as next year.”
His point is an important one: Timing can significantly shape outcomes for buyers and sellers. But it’s also where the market’s recovery starts to work against itself—if everyone waits for the market to swing in their favor, no one can transact.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act could eventually help loosen that bind by expanding opportunities at the edges of the market through measures that could support more multifamily units, infill, and remodeling of existing homes. One provision intended to ease manufactured housing rules, for example, could reduce production costs by an estimated $5,000 to $10,000 per home.
But there’s no public estimate yet showing how many homes the final package will add, how much it will reduce prices, or when those shifts will show up in the market. And some of its most ambitious programs will still depend on congressional appropriations, local participation, and private-sector follow-through.
That’s why Dennis Shea, executive vice president and chair of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy, doesn’t view the current delay as consequential for the bill, logistically or symbolically.
“The delay won’t have much of an impact, because many of the provisions need to be implemented over a period of months and not days,” he says. “It’s going to take some time to get those programs up and running and appropriated.”
In other words, while the market looks for relief now, the progress of landmark reform is measured over a much longer timeline.
The homes buyers are waiting for are still the hardest to find
Through that lens, the households under the greatest immediate pressure may not be those shut out of the market altogether. For many of these would-be buyers or sellers, the decision to wait has already been made by the costs in front of them.
The harder question belongs to the households that could move today, but would have to accept a less-than-ideal home, location, or monthly payment. For Brown’s clients, that trade-off looks very specific and familiar.
“They are waiting for one of two things: insurance to keep stabilizing, or the right single-family home in their community to come available at a price where the carrying cost makes sense,” he says.
In Naples, FL, where Brown is based, that usually means a turnkey single-family home on a good lot in an established community—at a price where the mortgage, insurance, and property tax bill do not overwhelm the buyer’s budget.
It’s just that those homes happen to be in short supply.
“Everyone wants the updated, well-maintained house on a good lot in a named community, and that specific product is the tightest inventory I have,” Brown says. “The house everyone actually wants is the one there is least of.”
The shortage is not merely a matter of too little new construction. In fact, Florida is one of just seven states that accounted for over half of the permits for construction issued in 2024, according to data from Realtor.com.
The problem is also one of stagnation. U.S. homeowners who sold in late 2025 had owned their homes for an average of 8.6 years—the longest tenure recorded since at least 2000, according to ATTOM data. And in the Sunshine State, that reluctance to move can be compounded by the state’s Save Our Homes protections, which cap annual increases in a homesteaded property’s assessed value.
For buyers like Brown’s clients, that means waiting is partly a bet that a homeowner with a low mortgage rate or low property taxes eventually decides the cost of moving is worth it—and puts their home back into circulation.
And that bet points back to the limits of what federal reform can deliver in the short term. The Road to Housing Act will no doubt improve the national market, but there are myriad local conditions that will also need to be addressed.
A solution on a different clock
That’s why Shea says reform needs to be looked at holistically.
“It’s going to take a little time for the impact of this bill to be felt, but one single piece of legislation is not going to solve the problem,” he says.
The Road to Housing Act could still have a broader catalytic effect, he adds, but cautions that the affordability crisis is too large for one piece of federal legislation to resolve on its own.
“It’s sort of the housing affordability challenge is a national problem, not just a federal problem,” Shea says. “So it’s going to have to be dealt with by multiple layers of government and by private actors and by philanthropy.”
That may be the clearest way to understand what the bill can—and cannot—do.
In the meantime, Brown says buyers will have to confront three choices: compromise on condition, compromise on location, or compromise on housing type. They can take an older home that needs work, move farther inland, or consider a condo and accept costs they did not initially want.
“The buyers who refuse all three tend to be the ones who end up renting and waiting,” Brown says.
It’s the costly question at the heart of the market. Buyers can accept the home available today, or wait for the market to release the home they actually want—without knowing whether the relief they are counting on will arrive before their own deadline does.
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