Wall Street Journal still unwisely telling everyone now is not the time to buy a home

WSJ’s home buying hater Nicole Friedman is still on the job. Today’s front page article laments that the number of homes sold went down. Is the WSJ mainly a periodical read by home builders? Nope. It is mainly read by the 80,000,000 home OWNERS, not the nation’s 412,020 home builders.
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She says unit sales are down because of “stubbornly high interest rates:” 6.96% now she claims. “Stubbornly?” She is anthropomorphizing the mortgage market? I think those rates are set by a Fed trying to knock down inflation. Do homeowners want inflation knocked down? I am sure they like appreciation in their home’s values—a big number. And I am sure they do not like egg and gasoline prices—small numbers—going up. Nicole Friedman apparently identifies more with would-be homeowner renters struggling to make ends meet. The percentage of those who subscribe to the WSJ is, I suspect, zero.
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Friedman says 6.96% is a “high” mortgage rate. Compared to what? When I bought my first duplex in 1969, I paid 7.25%. In the years from 1967 to 2002, rates were almost always ABOVE 7%. I do not know how old she is. I suspect she is a wet-behind-the-ears kid who thinks mortgages were not invented until she wanted one.
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
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The home information that WSJ readers care about is current home values. As usual with a Friedman article, the price information is buried near the end of the article—paragraph 18. the national median home price in December 2024 was$404,400, 6% more than December 2023. But Friedman wants you to focus on the “stubbornly high rates” and the lower unit sales. Be unhappy. Abandon your dream of buying a home. “Now is not the time to buy a home.”
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Yes, it is. I have been buying residential homes since 1969. Every time I bought one, everyone was saying, “Now is not the time to buy because [insert woe-is-me whining of the moment].”
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When interest rates were 3% in 2021, I think Friedman was saying to wait to buy because there were too many bidders on each home. At that time, my son and I looked at three homes, bid on two and got the second one we bid on. That was when every home got 30 bids. What was my trick? I bid higher on the third house. Duh. We got a 2.95% mortgage on that one.
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Buy a home with a mortgage. 
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https://johntreed.com/collections/real-estate-investment/products/an-american-principal-residence-is-the-most-advantaged-investment-on-earth-maximize-yours