The chart of the week looks at the average price of a “starter” home over time. Redfin categorizes this as houses sold between the 5th and 35th percentile. While a starter home average price is at $243,000, which is hard to believe for those of us in South Florida, the point made is that this price is up 13% from June 2022 and up 46% from June 2019. Everyone talks about real estate prices but we have seen the starting level prices increase considerably over the last 4 years. This is a problem for the housing market, especially when mortgage rates are the highest since the mid-2000s.