If you're in the market for a home, good luck.
It can be really difficult right now.
I think the general experience for home buyers is that it's stressful.
That's our colleague, Nicole Friedman.
She covers real estate.
It's very expensive to buy a home, especially these days.
Home prices are high.
Mortgage rates are high.
In a lot of parts of the country, there are still not enough homes to choose from.
The inventory is lower than it was before the pandemic.
And so they're really kind of glued to the listing sites, you know,
waiting for a new home to pop up, hoping that this could be the one.
Those online listing sites have become an essential part of buying a home.
Sites like Zillow and Redfin list thousands of homes for sale across the country.
I think for a lot of buyers, that's where they start the process.
If they're thinking about buying a home, even just casually like, oh, is this the year?
Maybe we should buy.
They go to one of these portals.
They set up, you know, search alerts for their neighborhood or their budget.
And so looking at home listings is often the very first step.