Typically, the housing market is driven by the good old supply and demand: more buyers drive prices up, which motivates homeowners to want to sell. However, what makes the housing market special is that most sellers don't actually "own" their homes yet—they’re still paying off a mortgage. So, when they decide to sell, they aren't just moving boxes; they are breaking a contract. They have to trade in their current interest rate for whatever the bank is charging today.

Imagine you’re a homeowner with a 3% mortgage. You want a bigger kitchen or a shorter commute. But if you sell today, the new mortgage will be 7%. Suddenly, that "dream kitchen" costs you an extra $1,500 every single month just in interest. What do you do? You stay put. You’re officially wearing "Golden Handcuffs."

We want to build a data model to find the "Breaking Point." Every person has a price, but do they have a "Rate Gap" they just won't cross? We are looking at the math behind the market freeze. We want to see if we can predict where and when a neighborhood will stop selling houses based purely on the difference between "Old Rates" and "New Rates."

Data set:
Kaggle Real Estate Sales, FRED (The Fed's Data), U.S. Census Bureau