Real estate CEO Ryan Serhant warns that property taxes, insurance premiums, and local policy friction have turned American homebuying into an "obstacle course" that punishes families trying to move, even as mortgage rates climb past 7%.
Serhant, the founder and CEO of SERHANT., sat down with Fox News Digital at his SoHo headquarters in New York City and laid out a blunt case: the sticker price and the interest rate are only a fraction of what keeps American families locked out of homeownership. The real weight, he argued, comes from layers of carrying costs that politicians and policymakers either created or refuse to fix.
His timing matters. The Federal Reserve raised its target range for the federal funds rate from 3.5%, 3.75% to 3.75%, 4%, a 25-basis-point increase and the first rate hike since July 2023, after the Fed left rates unchanged at its first five meetings this year. The average 30-year fixed refinance rate hit 7.11%, up from 7.07% a week earlier, per Mortgage Research Center data. The 15-year fixed refinance rate stood at 6.34%.
And home prices keep climbing. A Redfin report found U.S. home prices rose 3.7% year over year in August, the fastest annual growth rate in a year.
For buyers caught between rising rates and rising prices, the math already looks grim. Serhant's argument is that the math is even worse than most people realize.
Serhant told Fox News Digital that his company's national expansion, which began in 2023, forced him to rethink what drives the housing market. In New York, he said, real estate came down to price, rates, supply, and demand. Once SERHANT. started operating across the country, the picture got far more complicated.
"As we started expanding the company across the country in 2023, what we learned very, very quickly is that price and rates are only a small piece of what I would call, not even a housing market, but a housing obstacle course."
He went further, arguing that the system favors people who stay put and penalizes anyone who tries to relocate.
"You realize that the game has somewhat been rigged by those who created the obstacle course in the first place, and punishes mobility in favor [of] stability."
That framing cuts to a tension many conservative voters feel instinctively: government at every level has made it harder and more expensive to move, buy, and build, and the people who set those rules rarely bear the cost. Mortgage rates above 7% are squeezing would-be buyers out of the market entirely, but Serhant argues the squeeze starts well before the rate sheet.
Serhant singled out two states that conservatives have celebrated as havens from high-tax blue states: Florida and Texas. Both lack a state income tax, which has driven massive inbound migration in recent years. But Serhant warned that the savings evaporate once buyers account for property taxes, sales taxes, and insurance.
"If you think about a state like Florida, for example... And if you think about Texas, people think about no state income tax, but then they start to realize, 'Oh, how are real estate property taxes determined?' In Florida, it's almost 2% of what you pay. That's a lot."
He pressed the point on insurance, asking what it actually costs per month to insure a home in a coastal city, especially with private homeowners insurance. Natural disasters compound the risk.
"God forbid there's a hurricane, let alone a tornado, let alone an earthquake, let alone a forest fire."
The pattern Serhant describes is familiar to anyone who has watched Miami's housing boom lock out the middle class while high-net-worth buyers snap up beachfront properties. The headline tax rate tells one story. The total monthly cost of ownership tells another.
Serhant also took aim at New York City's non-primary-residence surcharge, commonly called the pied-Ã -terre tax. Politicians sold it as a way to target wealthy out-of-towners who park money in Manhattan apartments. Serhant said the policy missed its mark. It did not push the wealthy out. It froze middle-income owners who use a small city apartment to visit family or catch a Broadway show a few times a year.
"The pied-Ã -terre tax hasn't pushed people out of the city. What it's done is, it's frozen people who are in the middle, where that payment does really affect their monthly living costs, their monthly budget."
He described conversations with clients who had kept a modest one- or two-bedroom apartment in a decent building near a daughter living in the city. After the surcharge, some simply stopped making the trip. The tax did not soak the rich. It shrank the options of people in the middle, a result that should surprise no one who has watched similar policies play out in blue-state capitals.
Rising mortgage rates driven by inflation fears are only compounding the pressure on these owners, layering higher borrowing costs on top of new local surcharges.
When Serhant turned to where people are actually moving, his answer bypassed the usual suspects. He named Charlotte, North Carolina, as the fastest-growing city of the past year and one of the first markets SERHANT. expanded into three years ago.
"The Carolinas, I feel, are oftentimes overlooked in the news because they don't get the clicks. And a lot of the news is written by people who live on the East Coast or the West Coast in the major cities."
Serhant argued that what actually drives migration is not political headlines but job growth, access to education, and security. Policy gets the clicks, he said, but families move for practical reasons.
That tracks with a broader pattern visible in smaller cities drawing buyers fleeing coastal prices. Remote work and flexible employment have untethered families from the traditional requirement of living near a specific office or school district. Serhant put it plainly: investors and mobile workers no longer need to come to a particular city for a job, pay higher property or income taxes, or settle for a specific school system. They can be almost anywhere.
Serhant reserved some of his sharpest criticism for state and local governments that he said are taking a short-term view on growth. He named New York, Seattle, and parts of California as offenders.
"Governments need to take a long-term view. Their constituents do not. If I am a dad and I have a kid, I'm thinking, yes, about how I'm gonna raise them over the next 20 years, let's say, but I'm also really thinking about what I'm going to do with them on Saturday, and my commute to work tomorrow."
He contrasted that short-term constituent mindset with what government should be doing: thinking 10 or 20 years ahead about how to create opportunity and attract families. Instead, he said, the cities and states he named are chasing near-term revenue or political wins at the expense of long-term livability.
The consequences of that short-term approach are already showing up in the data. Foreclosure filings have surged 21% as financial strain spreads across American housing markets, a sign that the accumulated weight of rates, taxes, insurance, and stagnant policy is breaking through household budgets.
Serhant described his own company's mission in modest terms, saying SERHANT. is doing its "small, small part in trying to reduce the friction in what is the largest asset class on earth, which is property, to kind of bring the country back to where it needs to be." Whether a real estate firm can move that needle is an open question. What is not open to debate is that the friction he described, tax layers, insurance costs, regulatory surcharges, and policy incoherence, is real, documented, and growing.
Washington and state capitals built the obstacle course. The least they could do is stop adding hurdles while families are still trying to run it.