Mortgage rates, starter homes, and generational homebuying trends — real estate expert Deidre Woollard breaks down where mortgage rates stand in mid‑May 2026, why buyers aren’t rushing back despite slightly lower rates, and what’s changing for first‑time and repeat buyers.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Joining me now is real estate expert, Deidre Woollard. Deidre, always a pleasure to see you and welcome back to the program.
I know there’s been a little bit of time that we haven’t seen you, glad to have you back.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Glad to be here.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yep, and today we’re gonna talk about mortgage rates. There’s apparently a bit of a squeeze, but let’s level set. We’re in May, so middle of May, thereabouts.
How are we doing with mortgage rates relative to where they have been year over year?
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Well, year over year, we’re in a pretty good place where last year around this time, mortgage rates were 6.7, 6.8. We’re down to 6.2, 6.3, depending on where you go. But that’s not, it’s good, it’s better, but it’s not to the point where it’s really prompting a serious movement in home sales.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So before we get into home sales and the numbers there, I wanna ask you, what, outside of, and we’ve got a new Fed chairman, right? Coming in, yes, Kevin Warsh. Kevin Warsh is gonna be, but outside of what the Fed does, and that has some level of repercussions in the mortgage industry, what about the geopolitical events?
What’s happening in the Middle East? What’s happening with the Ukraine and Russia? Does that play a role at all in mortgage rates?
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
I think the biggest way it plays a role is uncertainty. We’ve got uncertainty all over the place. Geopolitically, as you’ve mentioned, with inflation, you know, the CPI and PPI numbers came out and they’re showing that inflation is continuing to rise.
We don’t have the handle on it that we’d like to. So all of those factors absolutely contribute because lenders have to feel secure and buyers have to feel secure in order for the whole thing to work. And that’s just not where we are at right now.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
No, there’s a lot of, I mean, you see it in the stock market. I think you see it in oil prices and gasoline prices and food prices. There’s a lot of uncertainty.
And we all, I mean, you, me, everybody, my mother and dad, everybody sees this. Okay, so those are things we can’t control. Well, not necessarily control.
Those are out of our day-to-day control. So let me ask you about these mortgage rates and let me ask you about the starter home. Is that dead now based on the 6.2, 6.3% interest rate?
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
I would say the starter home has been, if not dead, dying for a while, partly because, not just because of the mortgage rates and because of home prices, which are still at a high, I mean, the median price is over $417,000. And that doesn’t reflect the starter home price in cities. Zillow’s numbers show that a lot of starter homes in some cities are over a million dollars.
But we’re also seeing something different happen. We’re seeing that people are buying later. NAR’s numbers on first-time homebuyers, average age of 38.
That was not the case two or three decades ago. And really, first-time homebuyers are a smaller part of the market. So the starter home is now becoming really the home you stay in for 10 years or more.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So it’s your home.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
It’s your home.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
We’ve removed starter, we have home. So you kind of hinted at this, but let me ask you about the generational trends because people are, as you stated, based on the data, 38 years old is the average new homebuyer or first-time homebuyer. There’s a, you know, that’s a, I guess, millennial, late millennial or late Gen Z, whatever, early Gen Z.
How has this changed across the generations? Because boomers are staying in their homes longer.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Well, the interesting thing is that the median age of the repeat homebuyer is 63. So that means that people are staying in their homes longer and then making that shift later when they need to downsize. But the other interesting thing that’s happening among Gen Z is that over a third of Gen Z buyers are single women.
So there’s something happening with single women are not, they’re not waiting for marriage. They’re not waiting for children. They’re not doing things in that traditional order that we used to see.
If they can afford it, they’re getting the house when they’re financially ready.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So does that mean that maybe they’re more financially savvy? They’re earning good wage. They realize that your home is a big asset.
It’s probably the biggest asset, maybe even bigger than their 401k. So are they more financially literate, I guess, is my question.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
I often wonder what’s going on there. To some extent, I think there is a difference. There is a male-female divide in terms of where the money goes, in terms of men, potentially younger men, feeling more comfortable investing in the stock market or investing in things like crypto.
Some women are more interested in something that feels more secure, like purchasing a home.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, and, or I was gonna make a snide comment about sports betting, because I don’t know if you’ve been following that at all.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
It’s a big problem, yes.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
That is growing. I mean, not to take us off the, but let’s talk about that for a second. Gambling, sports betting, a lot of younger people, men and women, by the way, are doing that.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Younger men and women are doing sports betting Not just sports betting, Cal-She, PolyMarket, betting on everything.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, they’re betting on like political outcomes, they’re betting on whether or not somebody is gonna hit a three-pointer.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Yeah.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
But that, back to the financial literacy conversation and the home buying conversation, I kind of see that as more of a distraction than, I mean, you’re not gonna be a gazillionaire or even a millionaire, typically, sports betting. You’re gonna lose more than you win.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Well, some of this is about that uncertainty factor. If you don’t feel like your job is secure, if you don’t feel like your future is secure, if you feel like you’ve already lost ground compared to where your parents were, you start looking for the moonshot. You figure, I’m not gonna get there using the same path that my parents used.
I have to try something different. And so that path toward homeownership and security doesn’t necessarily look like it played out the way that they thought it would. So they’re trying other things.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
But aren’t there, and I wanna get your perspective on this, just from a financial perspective, aren’t there just certain tenets that work? The power of compounding, you save money, and they may not be making gobs and gobs of money. I mean, we can get into the whole AI conversation about how that’s making it harder for people out of college to get jobs.
But there are certain basic principles that if you start saving early, you’re gonna have more money than if you started waiting, right? And of course, you’ve gotta have that discretionary income.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Well, this is very true, but you’ve also seen these younger people saw, they saw 2008, they’ve seen these things that you believed in go belly up, and that has scarred them to some extent. And a home should be a good investment, but it’s not always necessarily the best investment or the best way to spend to where to put your money. I mean, I’m with you.
I believe in compounding, in saving early and slowly, and watching that build, putting things in an index fund, but that takes a long time, and young people aren’t known for their patience.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
No, they’re not. But I go back to, you mentioned 2008, I go back to the Great Depression. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression.
Now they’re deceased, of course, but it shaped who they were, but they scrounged and saved. So is it about maybe expectations, maybe the expectations for all of us that interest rates are gonna be so low, that a house is gonna appreciate at some rate, that we’re gonna earn some level of interest and our 401ks are gonna be X, Y, and Z. Maybe the expectations are here when in reality they need to be lower.
Is that part of it? So realigning our expectations.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
I think that’s definitely true, and I think that is very true when it comes to the starter home, because the starter home may not look like a yard and what we think of as a traditional, like a small two-bedroom house. It may be a condo, it may be a townhouse. One of the other factors about the starter homes is that home builders, they’re not building starter homes because the margins, they have to keep their margins, and if you’re gonna be getting the land, it doesn’t take that much more to build a bigger house and the margins are bigger, so of course they’re gonna build bigger houses.
So part of it is that. We have to reframe what a starter home looks like and when that comes into our lives.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
As we close out this segment, let me ask you, we actually started off the conversation talking or involving Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve Chairman. Jerome Powell, I think, is gonna stay on the Board of Governors as a governor, but what do you look for as an expert in interest rates and mortgage rates upon the ascension of Kevin Warsh? Because he was approved.
So when he starts, what are you gonna be looking for in terms of, I mean, this is a very intricate question, so I’m not expecting a 10-minute answer, but what are you gonna be looking for in terms of Fed policy and what that means for mortgage rates?
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
One of the things that Powell always stressed was that the Fed is not political. I hope Warsh will keep to that. I mean, Warsh is a person who has a lot of experience, a lot of years dealing with these sorts of things.
He was integral in the 2008 crisis and helping us navigate out of that. The most important thing is whether or not he listens to the data or whether or not he listens to political forces. And hopefully he listens to the data and doesn’t immediately drop interest rates, because I don’t think that’s gonna be beneficial for the economy.
We need to look at it. Certainly the last Fed meeting, the Board of Governors was definitely mixed in their voting about what should happen next. And so he’s gonna have to listen to all of the Board of Governors.
Powell has said he’s gonna play a quiet role, and I think that’s right. We just need Warsh to be able to listen to all of the governors.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, and I think that’s gonna be very interesting because you got some folks that are hawkish. You know, I’m not in those meetings, of course, and I just read the minutes, but there’s gonna be some people that are hawkish. You’re gonna have, you know, that’s part of the Fed chairman job is to, you’re almost like the president in a certain way of this central bank.
You’ve gotta listen to all these, what, there are 12 governors. You gotta listen to them, and they’re all gonna be on different sides of the issue depending on what their beliefs are. Absolutely.
Well, it’s gonna be interesting. Deidre, I thought we were just gonna talk about the mortgage squeeze. We did, but then we got into maybe some other things that I think were pretty exciting.
We always appreciate having you on the program, and we look forward to having you back again very soon.
Deidre Woollard, Real Estate Expert
Thank you so much.