Houses are being purchased before they are even posted for sale, making it more difficult for individuals to buy a house, according to a report by PBS News Hour.

Although the National Association of Realtors (NAR) implemented a policy against these "pocket listings" in 2019 that mandates brokers to advertise all properties to prospective purchasers on the multiple listing service (MLS), a publicly accessible online database, loopholes allowing the practice to continue still exist.

The Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research has reported that although some homes have become more affordable during the pandemic, renters have found it more difficult to become homeowners as the difference between the median sales price and median renter family income has increased.

Additionally, an ABC 13 report found that minorities face greater challenges in becoming homeowners than white applicants, even when all other factors are equal.

“Black homeowners have not recovered from the foreclosure crisis of 2008. A white high school dropout is more likely to own a home than a black college graduate,” Sharon Pratt, former mayor of the District of Columbia, stated in a YouTube video.

The Houston Area Urban League's housing services manager Glenda Kizzee asserts that a lack of education, access and financial obstacles like income and savings for a down payment and closing fees also make it difficult for working-class minority families to buy houses.

Additionally, a 2018 ethnographic study conducted by UNM professor Elizabeth Korver-Glenn found that white real estate agents were also able to "reproduce racial inequality in the contemporary housing market" through the use of segregated networks.