We're still looking currently, so I can say that it's fairly accurate for here as well. Except we really don't have downsizers because they are retiring elsewhere. It was already brutal in the sub-$250k market in 2017 and it has only gotten worse.

Thanks! We want a second child, and I am very risk-averse. So we requested pre-approval for $375k. Could we afford more? Technically. But it is a much tighter squeeze than we feel comfortable with especially with wanting to expand our family.

Interest rates are only a small part of my personal hesitancy behind selling/buying. The much larger portion is the lack of inventory in anything that is less than $400k in my area. Flippers and real estate companies are buying everything with cash. And I also recognized that we are very privileged to be where we are now. In 2017 I felt that if we didn't buy at that time (even though we took on a bit of PMI to do it and have since eliminated it) we would never be able to buy. Seems I was correct sadly.

We unfortunately live in an HOA neighborhood where they don't allow extensions to be built. There is technically enough space in the backyard to add more, but it would result in us losing half of our backyard which isn't big to begin with.

Developers in recent years have built houses so crammed together that there isn't land to add more square footage.

Our starting salaries were indeed low. We purchased at the end of 2017 and interest rates had already gone up to 4.7%. And our property taxes are covered by escrow which is rolled into our mortgage payment. Property taxes have also more than doubled on our current house and our escrow payment has gone way up as a result.

And we have also since had a baby, so a lot of our general expenses have increased along with all the general inflation prices increases associated with just living.

My spouse and I bought our starter home (3bed 2ba 1107 sq ft) in 2017 for $130k. Now we're trying to upgrade to bigger because we have since had a child and would like another. One bedroom is used as our office because my spouse works from home. But we have no ROOM. Our house is estimated to sell for $290k but we can only afford a mortgage on a $350k house now because of mortgage rates, even after more than doubling our income through job changes. The number of houses in our area in our price range is small, not much bigger than our starter house, and most of the time total gut jobs. We can't go anywhere. There's nowhere to go.