Housing is stuck: locked-in borrowers, slowing investors, and fewer new households

The lock-in problem

The United States housing market enters 2027 with a structural brake that has little to do with the number of homes for sale. Goldman Sachs Research expects mortgage rates to remain elevated at 6.4% in 2027, and says rising rates are likely to outweigh a longstanding housing shortage, pushing down both existing home sales and new construction. The firm projects existing home sales of just 3.9 million in 2027 and home price growth of 0.8% for the year, a second year of anemic price growth on its numbers. m:…5370

The reason sales stay low even as prices barely rise is that most owners have little reason to move. More than 95% of mortgage borrowers have interest rates below current market rates, Goldman Sachs notes, so selling and buying again would usually mean borrowing at a higher rate. Adjustable-rate mortgages make up less than 10% of outstanding mortgages, so the stock of cheap fixed-rate debt keeps turning over slowly. That lock-in effect is why a market with a shortage can still produce falling sales. m:…5370

Construction is not filling the gap. Goldman Sachs expects single-family starts of 0.87 million in 2027, and forecasts residential fixed investment to contract by 2.5%, 4% and 1% on an annualized basis in the three quarters after the third quarter of 2026, before any rebound in the second half of 2027. Weaker demand alongside still-solid supply growth should push the homeowner vacancy rate from 1.2% in the second quarter of 2026 to 1.4% by the fourth quarter of 2027, the firm says. m:…5370

Australia shows the same split

Australian credit data for September 2026 tell a similar story in a different form: overall lending still looks firm, but the housing part of it is splitting. Private sector credit grew 0.6% from a month earlier and 8.4% from a year earlier, Westpac reports, above the 0.5% monthly gain that Westpac and the market had forecast. Housing credit eased slightly, from 0.43% a month to 0.40%, bringing the annual pace to 7.0%. m:…0013

Within housing, investors are pulling back while owner-occupiers keep borrowing. Investor housing credit grew 0.2% in September from a month earlier, Westpac says, a fraction of the 0.8% to 0.9% monthly pace of the first half of the year. Owner-occupier credit, by contrast, held in a tight range of 0.45% to 0.50% a month for the past six months. The split matters because it shows the slowdown is concentrated where borrowing is most sensitive to returns and rates, not across every household. m:…0013

Westpac expects the higher interest rate environment to weigh on credit growth in the period ahead, and expects the Reserve Bank of Australia to deliver a follow-up rate hike in November, taking the cash rate to 4.85%. If that happens, the same rate pressure squeezing United States sales would be acting on Australian borrowers from the other side of the ledger, through the cost of new credit rather than the lock-in of old loans. m:…0013

Fewer new households

A third force works more slowly but points the same way. Goldman Sachs expects reduced immigration to continue weighing on household formation in the United States, which limits the number of new buyers entering the market even if rates ease. Northern Trust describes the scale of the shift: annual immigration traffic to the United States exceeded 3 million in both 2023 and 2024, and the combination of legal and illegal immigration has since fallen to very low levels after border enforcement was tightened and asylum windows narrowed at the start of 2025. m:…5370 m:…9852

Northern Trust also reports labor stress in agriculture, construction, hospitality, caregiving and food processing from the limited availability of foreign-born workers, though it finds little evidence so far that the shortages are pushing up wages or inflation. For housing, the construction link is the direct one: fewer workers available to build, alongside fewer new households to buy, leaves the market squeezed at both ends. Northern Trust adds that slower population growth means aggregate demand grows more slowly, which takes pressure off prices rather than supporting them. m:…9852

Put together, the three pieces describe a market that is not collapsing but is not clearing either. In the United States, cheap old mortgages keep owners in place and sales low. In Australia, investor credit is fading while owner-occupier borrowing holds up. And underneath both, a smaller flow of new households means demand recovers more slowly than a simple rate cut would suggest. Professionals watching housing should therefore track who is actually borrowing and forming households, not just the headline credit or sales number. m:…0013