‘Quiet quitting’ the U.S. housing market: One group of sellers has disappeared

The housing market’s all-important spring season has arrived, but there aren’t many homes going up for sale.

According to Realtor.com (see chart below), only 392,016 U.S. homes were listed for sale in April 2023. That’s below the 497,844 listed in April 2022—a period that was infamous for its tight supply—and far below the 552,082 listed in April 2019.

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather might have summed up the phenomenon the best when she tweeted last week: “Homeowners are quiet quitting the housing market.”

Fairweather is being a little tongue-in-cheek as she invokes quiet quitting—which refers to employees who are doing minimal work—to describe the lack of new inventory. That said, she’s onto something: Spiked mortgage rates have coincided with less move-up selling/buying.

As Fortune has previously explained, it just doesn’t make a lot of economic sense for someone with a 2% or 3% mortgage rate—one of the biggest financial perks of the pandemic—to sell their home and then try to buy a new home at a 6% mortgage rate. If they did so, they’d get a substantially larger monthly mortgage payment.