By: KeyCrew Media

As mortgage rates rise for a seventh straight week and rents climb at their fastest pace since April 2025, the Kaufman & Company founder says the housing to build now is rental and workforce housing

LOS ANGELES (Oct. 9, 2026). Daniel Kaufman, founder and CEO of the real estate and permanent capital holding company Kaufman & Company, said this week’s climb in mortgage rates to their highest level in nearly three years confirms a shift showing up across the housing market: demand is not disappearing; it is moving from ownership to rental.

Freddie Mac reported Oct. 8 that the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate rose to 7.40% from 7.28% the week before, its seventh straight weekly increase and the highest reading since November 2023. Two days earlier, Zillow’s September Market Report found newly pending home sales down 8.5% from a year earlier, while the typical U.S. rent rose 2.7% year over year to $1,932, the biggest annual gain since April 2025. Zillow estimated that a median income household would now spend 34.3% of its income on a typical mortgage payment, compared with 26.3% on rent.

“A household that was ready to buy in the spring is signing a lease this fall, and that does not reduce the need for homes; it changes which homes are needed,” Kaufman said. “The rate tells you who can buy. It does not tell you whether a town has enough places for nurses, teachers and lift operators to live, and in most of the markets we study, it does not.”

Kaufman said builders and owners should keep building, with product matched to where demand is going.

“Waiting for rates to come back down only works as a strategy if you need cheap debt to make a project pencil,” Kaufman said. “We invest our own capital, so we can keep buying land and moving entitlements while others pause, and have rental and workforce homes ready when that demand shows up in the rent roll. This is the part of the cycle when patient owners should be building, not watching.”

Kaufman & Company invests only its own capital and does not raise outside funds. Its housing businesses include DEK Builds, DK Homes, Design Build Affordable and LoneStar Kaufman, and it works alongside Oldivai, an aligned, independently led workforce housing partner focused on employer anchored communities. LandBriefing, a Kaufman Ventures platform, tracks land and housing fundamentals across U.S. markets.

About Kaufman & Company

Kaufman & Company (thekaufmanco.com) is a permanent capital holding company founded by Daniel Kaufman and the trade name of Kaufman Family Office LLC and Kaufman Real Estate & Consulting LLC. Its 10 operating companies are Convivium Living, DanReDev, DEK Builds, Design Build Affordable, DK Homes, Forge Development Partners, Kaufman Development, Kaufman Real Estate & Consulting, LoneStar Kaufman and Kaufman Ventures, whose portfolio includes BridgeStar, Meridian, LandBriefing, SpreadSight, FoundCheck, ServerDomes and Mr Good Container Homes. Oldivai is an aligned, independently led workforce housing partner. The platform represents more than $2 billion in project value and more than 10,000 housing units across more than 25 years of building, lending and investing.

Media Contact
Janine Rodrigues
KeyCrew Media
janine@keycrew.co