The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's downtown Boston office tower seen framed in the canopy of a South Station subway headhouse. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff / file

Aspiring homebuyers struggling to land a new home – let alone their dream home – and real estate agents and brokers hurting for clients could start to get some relief next year, according to a top housing economist.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, delivered that prediction to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors’ annual market outlook seminar, held Wednesday morning at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

“It’s been a difficult year” for the residential real estate industry, Yun said. “You know the reason: mortgage rates are rising, rising, rising.”

According to mortgage-buyer Freddie Mac, the average interest rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate home loan hit 7.79 percent this week.

Those rates, some of the highest in 20 years, have pushed most sellers to the sidelines whether due to being unable to afford to trade up or down or being unwilling to increase their monthly mortgage payment in return for the same or less space.

But, Yun said, America’s real estate agents can expect inventory of homes for sale to “bottom out” this year, and begin to rise in 2024.

The nation’s homeowners are still getting married and divorced, having children, getting new jobs, retiring and dying, he said, with millions being affected by these traditional drivers of a home sale happening every year.

With many would-be sellers having spent the last two years not moving, he told the audience of Realtors, pent-up demand to move is building.

“For example, it may be a family trading up and moving to the outer suburbs,” he said in an interview after his presentation, but said the country would likely only see a slow build-up of inventory and not a dramatic rebound to pre-pandemic levels of homes available for sale.

But Mark Melnik, director of economic and public policy research at the UMass Amherst Donahue Institute, noted in his own presentation to the GBAR seminar that the state continues to lag behind its housing production goals, keeping the available number of homes for sale and apartments for rent low and helping fuel a high cost of living that’s driving people to move out-of-state.

“People have been trying to make hay about why we’ve been having so much domestic out-migration. Some say it’s the Millionaires Tax. It’s not,” he said. “Disproportionately, our out-migrants are between 25 and 34 [years old]. Unless all of these guys play for the Red Sox, they are not millionaires.”

“To me this says a lot about the ability of young adults and families to start a life in the commonwealth and a lot of that is about affordable housing,” he added.

With home prices still the highest they’ve ever been in Greater Boston, some have questioned whether enough buyers still exist to keep prices from slipping as more inventory hits the market.

Melnik said Massachusetts still has plenty of high earners who still want to buy a home, but can’t. The state’s average per-person income is the second-highest in the country, just after Connecticut – home to a disproportionate share of the country’s super-rich.

“Prices got as high as they did for a reason,” he said in an interview following the seminar. “There are people out there renting, spending a lot of money on rent right now, but who have opted out of buying for now.”

Realtors also heard from state Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities Ed Augustus, who explained the main points of the Healey administration’s new housing production bill, filed last week. During a question-and-answer session following the three presentations, the audience peppered him with pointed questions about topics like rent control, which the administration’s bill did not include, and transfer taxes, which it did.

One questioner asked Augustus how he could square the inclusion of an optional municipal tax on the sale of real estate over $1 million with the administration’s stated goal of increasing housing affordability.

“It would create a pool of funds that towns will use for their affordable housing trust funds, and it will help our own [state] dollars go further,” he said, noting that the tax would only apply to more expensive sales. “But the truth is, if we want to increase funding for affordable housing, it can’t just be the taxpayers of the commonwealth using current tax base.”