Considering these variables, more than 75% of homes on the market are unaffordable to the typical household, according to a new Bankrate analysis released Monday. 

“When only a sliver of the market is affordable to the typical household, homeownership starts to feel less like a milestone and more like a luxury,” said Bankrate data analyst Alex Gailey. “It’s no surprise that one in six aspiring homeowners have walked away in the last five years.” Another Bankrate analysis from September shows one in six aspiring homeowners had completely given up on finding a home to buy.

Meanwhile, there’s a $30,000 gap between what the typical U.S. household makes and what it needs to afford a median-price home, according to the latest Bankrate analysis. The typical U.S. household earns about $80,000 per year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, but hopeful homebuyers need a $113,000 salary to afford a median-priced home. A median-priced home in the U.S. is $447,035, according to an August Redfin report.

But in some of the most desirable U.S. metros, buyers need far more to afford a median-priced home. The following is a list of the 10 cities requiring the highest salaries in the U.S., per Redfin:

1. San Jose, Calif.: $413,100
2. San Francisco: $393,443
3. Anaheim, Calif.: $302,587
4. Oakland, Calif.: $244,073
5. Los Angeles: $234,619
6. San Diego: $227,612
7. Seattle: $219,498
8. New York City: $213,245
9. Nassau County, N.Y.: $207,386
10. Boston: $204,465

Bankrate’s analysis also showed Los Angeles, San Diego, and Boston were among the cities where affordable homes are the hardest to find, also including New Orleans and Miami. 

“For many families, the challenge isn’t just high home prices and elevated mortgage rates,” Gailey said. “It’s that housing shortages across the country have left them with far fewer homes they can afford.”

However, there are a few U.S. cities where affordable homes are at least a little easier to find. That includes Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and Birmingham, Ala.

Realtor.com recently crowned Pittsburgh as the most affordable city in America, where the median home price is less than $250,000. “In a housing landscape where affordability has eroded nationwide, Pittsburgh remains a rare bright spot where buying a home is still within reach for most households,” Realtor.com senior economic research analyst Hannah Jones said in a statement. 

The Washington Post also recently profiled Pittsburgh as having one of the most affordable housing markets in the U.S., giving the example of grocery store deli counter manager Liam Weaver, 30, and professional ballet dancer Issac Ray, 26, who bought their first home in Pittsburgh for just $163,000. Although they spent about $10,000 on renovations, the cost of the house was only about one-third the cost of a median-priced home in the U.S. 

But Pittsburgh, among other semi-affordable cities, is most certainly the outlier in today’s housing market. 

“Affordability looks very different depending on where you live,” Gailey said. “Some large cities still give median-income households a path to buying a home, while others have become increasingly difficult to break into.”

And some Americans—particularly younger generations—have been desperate to break into the housing market, grasping for long-term financial stability and the same security their parents and grandparents earned by buying a home. Some millennials are carpooling for homes, teaming up with friends and family to buy a house. Some Gen Zers are taking on multiple side hustles just to save up enough to afford a down payment. 

Realtors working with these clients have also encouraged them to accept the idea of “trading up,” or essentially settling for a cheaper house and one that’s certainly not a dream home. Paul Beaudreau with KW Realty in Burlingame, Calif., previously told Fortune he teaches buyers that purchasing a more affordable house first, building equity, then selling it, can be an easier way to save up for a down payment on a dream home down the road.

“While I don’t try to tell my clients to give up on that dream home, I’m trying to explain to them what the path is to get to that dream home,” he said. “Your first home is never your last home, and quite frankly is never your dream home.”

A survey by integration platform Workato and Harvard Business Review of more than 600 tech leaders found that most respondents find agents more trustworthy outside of core business areas, while just 6% said they fully trust agents with essential end-to-end business processes. But that hasn’t curbed interest: 86% said their companies plan to invest more in agentic AI over the next two years.

More than two in five (43%) of respondents said they only trust agents with routine operational tasks, 39% said they delegate agents to “supervised use cases or complex, noncore processes,” and 8% said they don’t trust agents with business operations at all.

“This report is almost exactly the conversation I had with [CEO friends],” Workato Chief Information Officer Carter Busse told us. “When I read it, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this actually is real data [for] the conversations I’m having where, ‘Yeah, we bought all these Chats and Claudes and Geminis and people can summarize their emails and look up stuff in their calendar and help me write a nice letter.’ But is that real work? It’s not.”

As AI systems that purport to perform tasks autonomously have sashayed into vogue in the corporate world, trusting these systems to handle important business functions has become a sticking point. That’s especially true as agents are integrated into various workplace platforms through protocols.

Busse said many agents currently in use might perform simple tasks like creating IT tickets. But those that can handle more complicated processes are still in their earliest stages of adoption, he said.

“We’re very, very early,” Busse said. “When I think of agents, I think of real work…A real work agent does a multistep, complex process that’s trusted. That’s going to take a long time to get there.”

The report also found that agents do not yet meet expectations across all measures surveyed, which included “improved organizational productivity/efficiency,” “improved customer experience,” and “increased revenue.” Among the biggest roadblocks were cybersecurity and privacy worries (which 31% of respondents cited), “concerns about data output quality” (23%), and that “business processes [are] not ready for automation” (22%).

As an integration platform itself, Workato has an interest in pitching orchestration—the coordination of specialized agents—as a solution for some of these business challenges. Standardized protocols that let agents communicate with one another and with common business tools have been gaining traction.

Workato also uses agents internally to do things like prepping sales reps for calls using Salesforce and Gong data, or monitoring and creating plans to combat clients’ reduced usage of the platform, according to Busse.

He said to expect to continue to see businesses adopting agents in 2026, but widespread use of multi-step complex agents may be “two, three years away.”

This report was originally published by Tech Brew.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 7.67 million vacancies in October, close to September’s 7.66 million.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which was delayed by the extended government shutdown, also showed that the layoffs rose and number of people quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in the labor market — fell in October.

Job openings have come down steadily since peaking at a record 12.1 million in March 2022, when the economy was roaring back from COVID-19 lockdowns. The job market has cooled partly because of the lingering effect of the high interest rates the Federal engineered in 2022 and 2023 to combat an outburst of inflation.

Overall, it’s a puzzling time for the American economy, buffeted by President Donald Trump’s decision to reverse decades of U.S. policy in favor of free trade and instead impose double-digit tariffs on imports from most of the world’s countries.

Policymakers at the Federal Reserve are meeting this week to decide whether to cut their benchmark interest rate, and the gathering is expected to be unusually contentious. Inflation remains stuck above the Fed’s 2% target, partly because importers have tried to pass along the cost of Trump’s tariffs by raising prices. Normally, stubborn inflation would discourage Fed policymakers from cutting rates. But the job market has looked shaky in recent months, and the Fed is expected to reduce its benchmark rate for the third time this year, though some policymakers might dissent.

Meanwhile, the 43-day federal shutdown has made a mess of the government’s economic statistics.

The October report on job openings came out a week late, and the September version was not published separately because federal data collectors were on furlough. Instead, September’s JOLTS numbers were folded into Tuesday’s report along with October’s.

The Labor Department will issue numbers for hiring and unemployment in November next Tuesday, 11 days later than originally scheduled. The department is not releasing an unemployment rate for October because it could not calculate the number during the shutdown. It will release some of the October jobs data — including the number of positions that employers created that month — along with the full November jobs report.

Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet predict that employers added fewer than 38,000 jobs in November and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.5% from September’s 4.4%, how by historical standards but the highest in nearly four years.