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Real Estate Market's Summer Rebound Derailed: Mortgage Rates, Iran War ...
Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI America's real estate market was all set for a hot selling season. Those hopes have been dashed. Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI By James Rodriguez You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. 2026-04-29T08:24:01.319Z Making it in real estate requires a certain degree of blind optimism: a belief that, despite the market's ups and downs, the buyers will come knocking, the home inspection will come up clean, and both parties will shake off the jitters and sign on the dotted line. Never does that faith flow more freely than in the weeks leading up to the busy spring selling season in March and April, when better weather tends to coax buyers and sellers out of hibernation and into a flurry of dealmaking that sets the tone for the rest of the year.In the past few years, this eternal optimism has not been rewarded. Most recently, President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs spoiled hopes of a spring rebound in 2025. With would-be buyers feeling uneasy about borrowing rates, the economy, and their jobs, many decided to stay put. Not to be discouraged, real estate agents came into 2026 daring to dream again. Mortgage rates had drifted lower, and home prices were easing in much of the country, sweetening the math for buyers. The labor market wasn't roaring, but it was holding up. Plus, the thinking went, buyers could only put off big life changes for so long. Eventually, people had to get moving again. Maybe 2026 was finally the year."We were all excited," Neil Brooks, a Phoenix-area real estate agent, tells me. "Everybody was doing good, thinking, 'Okay, maybe this will be it. Let's hold our breath and hope nothing else happens.'Brooks pauses: "But then something else happened."For the second year in a row, sellers, agents, and analysts are mourning a spring bump that failed to materialize. And once again, they're pointing the finger at geopolitical turmoil: this time, it's the war in Iran, which sent borrowing rates skyward and made everyday items, notably gas, more expensive. The conflict has weighed on both consumers' finances and their psyches — if there's one thing homebuyers hate to hear before the biggest purchase of their lives, it's "uncertainty." To top it all off, the war began just as sellers would typically start planting for-sale signs in their thawing front yards."The timing of all this couldn't have been worse from a housing perspective," says Rick Palacios Jr., the directo...
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