What if Lock-in entrenchment drags brokerage volumes and agent commissions?
Persistent rate lock-in keeps transaction counts depressed, squeezing real-estate brokerage revenue and agent counts; the volume drought de-rates Zillow, Compass and franchise brokerage models reliant on turnover.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Persistent rate lock-in keeps transaction counts depressed, squeezing real-estate brokerage revenue and agent counts; the volume drought de-rates Zillow, Compass and franchise brokerage models reliant on turnover. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Consumer spending ▼ · Mortgage rates ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.