Real estate professionals are well aware that housing affordability and supply are in short order, but are lawmakers taking appropriate action? On Wednesday, December 3, 2025, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing focused on policies to boost housing supply. In attendance to testify before the committee was National Association of Realtors® (NAR) Immediate Past President Kevin Sears (also an associate broker at Lamacchia Realty).
Testifying alongside Sears were Julie Smith (chief administrative officer of Bozzuto, a construction, development and property management firm), Tobias Peter (co-director of the housing center at the American Enterprise Institute) and Nikitra Bailey (executive vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance).
In both his prepared opening remarks and subsequent questioning, Sears returned to the idea that burdensome or outdated building, permitting, zoning and financing rules are holding back housing supply, and buyers—especially first-time buyers—are paying the price.
“We (real estate professionals) help first-time homebuyers search for months, only to watch them get outbid by all-cash offers or find there’s simply nothing available within their budget,” Sears said in his opening statement. “This is not a partisan issue. It’s a generational one, and it’s getting worse, not better. If we continue down this path, America risks becoming a nation where owning a home—the defining marker of stability and success—is reserved for the few, not the many.”
A topic mentioned throughout the hearing is the increasing “typical” age of first-time homebuyers, which NAR has found is now about 40. Shannon McGahn, executive vice president and chief advocacy officer at NAR, recently wrote an op-ed in the Hill about this topic, urging policymakers to act just as Sears did at the hearing.
The hearing, which frequently returned to topics and housing-related challenges that will be familiar to any real estate professional, saw various congressional representatives ask the witnesses both why current housing affordability issues exist and recommended policies to resolve them.
Sears answered regularly that cutting red tape must be the priority, though also that reform must be accomplished with a package of policy changes and that change will not be instantaneous.
“We’re not going to get out of it overnight, but we need to start today,” he said.
As for the role the federal government can play when housing is a state and local issue, Sears said (during questioning by Congressman William Timmons, R-SC) that the government could help with infrastructure costs, offer block grants to communities and encourage those communities to streamline their building processes.
Sears cited repeatedly the hurdles developers and builders face to simply begin construction on the house, seen in both the cost of permitting and the uncertainty of approval (which discourages investors).
“When it costs $100,000 approximately before the shovel gets in the dirt, that is a significant issue,” he said. When Timmons asked Sears if he had ever witnessed bad actor bureaucrats who invoked regulations to stop projects they disagreed with personally, Sears answered with a concise “100%.”
Modular and prefabricated housing is one remedy that Sears and NAR voiced support for to close the supply gap. Academic research by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University has found that factory-built housing can deliver units faster and in greater supply.
As noted in Sears’ testimony and during questioning by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA), modular housing (which is built to federal codes and must have a “permanent chassis” to be movable) often faces zoning restrictions in zones that ban homes built to federal, rather than local, standards. One of the pieces of legislation NAR offered support for is the Housing Supply Expansion Act, which updates the definition of modular housing so as to encourage more construction of it and ease homeowners finding financing for it.
A major theme during the hearing of what reaching supply that meets demand will take is updating traditional thinking around zoning and construction in residential districts.
Witnesses were sometimes asked about housing reforms at the local level which they believe accomplished the goals of more supply.
Sears pointed to a 2024 reform of zoning for accessory dwelling units (ADUs), passed in his home state of Massachusetts, that allows ADUs under 900 square feet to be built in single-family home zoned districts. Peters, who voiced support for smaller lot sizes and small, less expensive homes as a major goal, pointed to a law passed this year in Texas that allows smaller lot sizes in residential divisions when facing this line of questioning himself.
One of the most memorable responses to the idea of cutting red tape in the housing permitting and construction processes came from Congressman Sean Casten (D-IL). Casten invoked the fairy tale of the “Three Little Pigs” in an effort to argue speed isn’t everything in home-building and that many building codes are in place for good reason.
“Some of this conversation is, ‘We can lower costs if only we didn’t have so many building codes, if only we didn’t have to build climate resilient homes, if only we didn’t put efficiency codes in so people can save more on energy,’ and it’s true, you build a house out of straw, it’s cheaper than building a house out of brick,” Casten said.
Specific policies
Other topics, and questioning faced by Sears, during the hearing focused on hot-button political topics that still have a reverberating effect on housing and construction. For instance, several Republican committee members asked Sears and other witnesses about rent control, in reference to New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s push for a rent freeze in the city during his campaign. Sears answered, each time he was asked, that rent control discourages investment in supply, keeps apartments off the market and does not accomplish its goals of reducing prices.
When asked by Congresswoman Young Kim (R-CA) about the impact of raising the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap in the Big Beautiful Bill, Sears answered “(It) is very important, as is securing the mortgage interest deduction…These are very real costs, and I always find it ironic that citizens would have to pay taxes on taxes they’ve already paid.”
Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY), who supported and actively negotiated the raising of the SALT cap from $10,000 to $40,000, asked Sears if he “appreciated” the higher cap. Sears said that he did.
Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) questioned Sears and Smith about the rising costs of insurance, including for multifamily homes. Smith floated the idea of the government subsidizing insurance to alleviate costs on property owners, while Sears suggested grants and low interest loans for homeowners to reinforce their properties for climate resilience.
Velázquez also opened her allotted time by discussing the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on housing construction. One of the major concerns about tariffs earlier in the year was that they would hike prices on key construction materials. Velázquez cited research by the Brookings Institute that the tariffs will add about $30 billion to the cost of investment in residential building. Sears, in later questioning by Sherman, referred to tariffs as a “2025 issue” and argued the escalating costs of construction were in place before the tariffs.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) used her questioning time to focus on the issue of fair housing and the administration’s “undermining of fair housing laws,” citing reporting by ProPublica about the firing of HUD officials who investigate and enforce such laws.
Tlaib asked Bailey point-blank if the Fair Housing Act is currently being enforced, and Bailey said that no, it is not, continuing that complaints of housing discrimination (particularly disability discrimination) are at a “record high.” When Tlaib and Bailey discussed the enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed women to apply for mortgages without a man signing, Sears interjected to note data showing that single women are the largest growth demographic for new homebuyers—“We are going in the right direction,” Sears said.
Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) asked Sears about the impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and the administration’s goals of mass deportation on the construction industry; many workers in the construction industry are undocumented immigrants. Garcia cited previous testimony to the committee from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), which estimates about one-in-four construction workers are immigrants, has voiced support for immigration reform to build a “skilled workforce.”
In response to Garcia’s question, Sears initially began talking about the increasing age of American tradespeople and the need to recruit younger workers. When Garcia pushed him on the ICE question, Sears replied he was “not in a position to speak” about deportation, but that he would encourage administration to allow skilled workers to work in the U.S.
Sears and NAR did not immediately response to a request for comment by RISMedia.
For the full hearing, click here.
