Rising Costs Make Home Sales Increasingly Expensive for Sellers

For generations, selling a home marked a passage — a financial and personal threshold crossed with relative confidence. Today, that threshold has grown costly enough to give pause: transaction fees consuming eight to ten percent of a sale price have quietly transformed the decision to sell into a calculation many homeowners are choosing not to make. In markets where wages have not kept pace with property values, the machinery of real estate transfer now extracts a toll that shapes not just individual choices, but the broader availability of housing itself.