Despite the cooling housing market, inventories of existing homes for sale have barely budged from all-time lows experienced during the pandemic. As a result, homebuyers have increasingly turned to the new home market which comprises a higher share of available inventory. Meanwhile, in an attempt to alleviate growing affordability pressures on buyers due to increased interest rates, homebuilders are offering incentives to buyers in the form of interest rate buydowns. These two factors have combined to markedly increase the attractiveness of the new home market for many buyers. According to the recently released State of the Nation’s Housing 2023, the number of existing homes available for purchase today remains near the record lows set in early 2022. Indeed, there were just 970,000 existing homes on the market in March 2023, up 4 percent from the year before but down 42 percent from the same month in 2019—a period when inventories were already historically low.