The stock market, bond market and housing market are all kind of in flux these days with everything going on tariff- and inflation- and interest rate-wise.  

On housing, the National Association of Realtors’ report on existing home sales for February came out better than economists expected, up 4.2% from January. But for context, January had been down 4.7% from the month before. January was also the month that pending home sales, a leading indicator of existing-home-sales-to-come, fell to the lowest level on record.  

Housing numbers can bounce around — weather, mortgage rates, just noise in the data. Right now, heading into spring, the market’s looking slightly rosier than it did earlier this year.  

But we also know housing markets can also vary, a lot, depending on where you’re looking.

I’ve been doing a kind of round-robin of calls to brokers and real estate agents across the country recently. And some of what I heard could have been copied-and-pasted from one place to another:

“We’ve had a shortage of inventory, so it’s a good market for sellers, a difficult market for buyers.” – Mike Frank at Keller Williams in Chicago, Illinois.

“Less inventory, prices going up. Buyers competing for properties.” – Debbie Kallfelz with Coldwell Banker in Syracuse, New York.

“We’re seeing a frenzy of activity, very limited inventory and multiple offers.” – Israel Hill at John L. Scott in Portland, Oregon.  

Kallfelz pointed out we’re not seeing such low inventory everywhere.

“Real estate’s always local, we always say that. Other parts of the country, Florida’s an example — condo market, a lot of listings there, for a variety of reasons, insurance and condo fees,” she said.

While Portland’s got a ‘frenzy’ of housing activity, Kallfelz said in the Syracuse area listings are slowing — down about 10% year-to-date.  

It’s a similar story in Charlotte, North Carolina, said real estate agent Steve Scott: “It’s a little slow, even with all the incentives that the builders are putting out,” he said.

Meanwhile, the area has a wave of new buyers coming in.

“We have a lot of retirement — people moving here from the north, and some return from the south because they didn’t like Florida,” he said. That’s making it hard for first-time buyers to compete.

But head south to Texas?

“I’m still seeing affordable houses, $300,000s for my first-time homebuyers,” said Mollie Yarborough Steele at Compass Real Estate in Houston.

She said plenty of new starter homes are going up in the suburbs. The fiercest competition is for homes over a million dollars, where she’s seeing a lot of cash offers.

“Which is so amazing to me, that this many people have this much cash,” Steele said.

But with financial markets down sharply in recent weeks, some of that ready-cash may start to dry up.