Every spring, the American housing market is supposed to wake up. Buyers who hibernated through winter start browsing listings. Sellers who waited for warmer weather plant lawn signs. Mortgage applications tick upward. Open houses fill with young couples doing mental arithmetic.

Spring 2026 arrived. The housing market did not.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 6.53 percent on March 20, its highest level since September 2025, according to Freddie Mac data [1]. It retreated slightly to 6.38 percent by March 26 [2]. Various daily trackers showed rates oscillating around 6.49 percent through the final week of March. The trajectory since the war began is unmistakable: rates were approaching 6 percent in late February, briefly dipped below it, and then reversed sharply as oil prices, inflation expectations, and Treasury yields all climbed in response to the conflict.

The war premium is now embedded in mortgage rates. The mechanism is straightforward. Oil at $100 per barrel pushes up energy costs, which pushes up inflation expectations, which pushes up the 10-year Treasury yield, which pushes up mortgage rates. The Fed, which had been gradually easing through 2025, is now trapped. Cutting rates would risk amplifying inflation that is being driven by supply-side energy disruptions. Holding rates freezes the housing market further. There is no move that solves both problems [3].

As this paper noted in its earlier coverage, the spring market was already fragile before the war. The lock-in effect -- existing homeowners sitting on 3 and 4 percent mortgages from 2020-2021 refusing to sell into a 6 percent market -- had suppressed inventory for two years. The National Association of Realtors reported existing home sales running at their lowest pace in over a decade. New listings were increasing modestly, but buyers were not showing up to match them [4].

CNBC's March 20 coverage put it plainly: "The spring housing market is on, but mortgage rates just shot higher" [1]. The framing treated the rate spike as an obstacle to an otherwise healthy market. The reality is that the market was not healthy before the spike. It was frozen. The war made it colder.

Mortgage applications plunged in the final week of March as rates reached their five-month high [5]. The Mortgage Bankers Association's purchase index, which tracks applications for home-buying loans, fell for the third consecutive week. Refinancing activity, which had shown signs of life when rates briefly touched the 5.9 percent range in February, collapsed back to near-record lows.

The arithmetic confronting a first-time buyer in March 2026 is punishing. A median-priced home at $412,000 with 10 percent down at 6.49 percent produces a monthly payment of roughly $2,345 -- before taxes, insurance, and maintenance. At 5 percent, that same home costs $1,990 per month. The war premium adds $355 per month, or $4,260 per year, to the cost of owning the median American home. For buyers at the margin, that gap is the difference between qualifying and not.

Sellers are stuck too. The homeowner who bought at 3.1 percent in 2021 and wants to move faces a rate that has doubled. Their monthly payment on a comparable home would increase by 50 to 70 percent. So they stay. Inventory stays low. Prices stay high despite falling demand. The market does not crash. It does not recover. It sits.

Bloomberg's headline on March 26 -- "Mortgage Rates Jump to 6.38% as War Rattles Housing Market" -- captured the proximate cause but not the structural trap [2]. The housing market is not rattled. Rattled implies a temporary disturbance. What is happening is a sustained freeze driven by a war with no timeline, built on top of a lock-in effect with no expiration date, governed by a central bank with no good options.

The spring market is a ghost town. The war made it one.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels