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This picture is a product of the pandemic but also of the years leading up to it.

“The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic? That’s what I keep coming back to. Is this a time you want to open your house up to people walking through it? No, of course not.”

A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers or older — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.

Newly built homes are just what a tight housing market needs.

When a brand-new home comes on the market, no one has to move out (and elsewhere) to free it up. “Home building is an empty home. They’re just bringing empty homes to the market," said Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors

There is another factor particular to the pandemic: At the peak, more than 4 million homeowners with government-backed loans were in mortgage forbearance during the pandemic (about 2.6 million still are).

While that government policy, recently extended through June, has been a lifeline for many families who’ve lost income, it has also meant that some homes that most likely would have come on the market over the past year, either through foreclosure or a forced sale, did not.

Over the past decade, he points out, the number of single-family homes in the rental market grew by more than 7 million. And the vast majority of single-family rentals are owned by individuals, not big institutional investors. Other opportunities to make revenue off investment properties have also boomed with the rise of companies like Airbnb.

Normally, economists expect rents and home prices to move together in a given community. That’s because both respond to the same underlying conditions — a strong labor market, popular amenities, proximity to the ocean. When rents and home prices start to diverge, that’s usually a sign of something amiss, like a housing bubble inflating.

Right now, in a number of metro areas, home prices and rents aren’t just drifting apart; they’re moving in opposite directions. Prices are rising while rents are falling.