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It’s time to unleash AI on the ailing US housing market.
“If AI could shorten the permit timeline, that alone seems logical,” Property Brothers‘ Jonathan Scott said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid (video above).
“There are so many projects where I have the project either ready to go, and we’re waiting for six months or eight months or even a year just on permits,” he said. “The only exception actually was rebuilding my fiancé’s family home in the Palisades that burned. My permit was approved in less than three weeks … But everywhere else, it’s either the utilities or it’s the cities that are delaying these for no real reason.”
Jonathan and his twin brother, Drew, are the dynamic duo from HGTV’s “Property Brothers,” where they help families find and renovate homes. The Scotts have also branched out through the Healthy Home Innovation Fund, which invests in tech companies innovating in the residential sector.
More recently, they debuted a new HGTV show called “Under Pressure.” The premise is to assist would-be homebuyers in the purchase process and then help them add smart upgrades to the property.
At this point, tapping into ever-increasing AI superpowers could only help the sluggish US housing market.
The US housing market could currently be defined as “two-speed,” where stabilizing mortgage rates are clashing with new geopolitical volatility.
Read more: When will mortgage rates go down? Oil prices and inflation create uncertainty.
The Trump administration’s $200 billion liquidity injection — in the form of mortgage bond purchases — briefly pushed 30-year fixed rates below 6% in February. But the war in Iran has reversed that momentum.
Mortgage rates have risen back up to 6.43% as of March 24 due to soaring oil prices and inflation fears.
Affordability remains the primary hurdle to buying a house. The typical household now spends nearly 47% of its annual income on recurring bills, with housing costs acting as the biggest anchor.
Inventory levels have risen modestly by 4.9% year over year, yet supply remains stuck at a 3.8-month level — well below the six months experts consider “balanced.” This scarcity continues to prop up prices in resilient markets like the Midwest and Northeast.
“[The government] could reduce the barriers to building,” Compass founder and CEO Robert Reffkin said on Opening Bid. “I think the best thing we can do is to create more inventory with the existing home sales market. So there’s builders, but that’s going to take a long time, and we don’t have that much time. The existing home sales market is the one that is been held back because mortgage rates have been low, a lot of people are locked into sub 4% mortgage rates.”