The MLB Playoffs Put a Wealth Divide on Display. Housing Has One, Too.

Major League Baseball’s National League Championship Series kicks off on Sunday with a matchup that feels almost comically on the nose for a question hanging over the sport—and the housing market.

The Milwaukee Brewers have won more games than any other team this season while spending less than half as much on players as their opponent, the Los Angeles Dodgers—a difference of roughly $146 million versus $339 million, according to Sportrac. Los Angeles’ deeper pockets allowed it to spend heavily on proven stars in free agency, while Milwaukee got much of its production from homegrown talent it supplemented through trades.

Regarding L.A.'s resulting roster, as Brewers manager Pat Murphy put it after Milwaukee advanced on Wednesday: “There’s like an All-Star at every position."

The contrast gets at the question Major League Baseball is struggling to answer: Have the financial advantages of its richest teams grown large enough to change the nature of the competition itself?

And as high home prices and mortgage rates continue to weigh on buyers, the housing market is confronting its own version of that question: Have years of uneven wealth gains left households competing in the same market with vastly different buying power?

Wealth changes the playing field

Baseball offers an unusually vivid analogy for the housing market for several reasons. For one, all 30 teams play under essentially the same leaguewide rules. But unlike the NFL, NBA, and NHL, Major League Baseball has no salary cap.

Instead, teams pay a luxury tax once their payroll, as calculated under MLB rules, crosses a set threshold—$244 million this year. The penalties rise the further above it a team spends, but there is no point at which MLB forces it to stop.

That gives the deepest-pocketed clubs a much wider range of options. They can pursue more top free agents, keep stars they develop, replace players who do not work out, and absorb contracts that would consume a far larger share of another team’s budget.

And MLB’s own analysis shows how far the spending gap has widened. The league calculates that the five highest-payroll teams spent about 4.7 times as much as the bottom five in 2025, up from 2.6 times as much in 2018.

Housing has developed a similar split.

Since early 2023, real wealth among the top 1% of households by income has risen more than 25%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Wealth among the middle 40% grew by less than 10%.

That gap changes the size of the housing market a household can realistically shop.

A buyer with substantial savings or home equity can put more down, borrow less, absorb a higher mortgage rate, or pay cash. A household with fewer financial resources is far more dependent on what its income can support at prevailing rates.

“Equity-rich, higher-income households are less interest-rate-sensitive and are more likely to take advantage of expanding inventory to make a purchase this spring,” Bright MLS Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant said this spring.

And today, a household earning about $75,000 could afford just 23% of homes listed nationwide. In a balanced market, homes within reach of those buyers would account for about 44% of listings.

The market can create the bankroll for the next round

Baseball’s spending problem is partly rooted in something teams don't necessarily control: where they start.

Large-market clubs can generate far more money from tickets, sponsorships, and local media rights. Today, MLB estimates the revenue potential of its largest and smallest markets differs by roughly 9 to 1.

The difference is so large that calling it a gap almost feels disingenuous—a better term might be chasm. But more importantly, it shows the power a market can exert over how much financial firepower a club carries into the next competition.

Housing has its own feedback loop.

Among repeat homebuyers, 54% used proceeds from the sale of a previous home to help finance their next purchase, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Their median down payment was 23%. Thirty percent bought without a mortgage at all. Sellers had owned their previous homes for a record 11 years, giving many time to pay down debt and accumulate equity.

So one round of homeownership can alter the terms of the next. But how much of an advantage that creates depends heavily on where the home is—and where the owner moves next.

San Francisco Bay Area residents who left for cheaper markets show how powerful that advantage can become. Movers typically landed in neighborhoods where home values were about 50% lower. Among those who left California altogether, the homeownership rate was 9 percentage points higher five years later—a 33% relative increase.

The longer the game, the more often the advantage can surface

Baseball offers another useful comparison: Its season gives an advantage an enormous number of chances to matter.

Each team plays 162 regular-season games—nearly twice as many as an NBA or NHL team and almost 10 times the NFL’s 17. Over that many games, richer clubs get repeated opportunities for their financial advantage to compound by absorbing an injury, replacing an underperforming player, or adding talent when another team cannot.

Stretch that across multiple seasons, and those chances just keep piling up.

An analysis of payroll data dating to 1988 found that payroll rank and wins rank have moved in the same direction in every season but one, even though plenty of high-spending teams lose and low-spending teams win.

Related research cited by The Ringer found another pattern: High-payroll clubs are rarely among baseball’s biggest losers, while low-payroll clubs are rarely among its biggest winners. Eight of the past 10 World Series champions ranked among baseball’s 10 highest payrolls.

The Ringer also notes that the relationship between payroll and wins is generally modest, and that by other measures—including how often teams reach the postseason or move up and down the standings—MLB has remained relatively competitive.

What money appears to change is the odds over repeated opportunities.

MLB’s own analysis, released as the league makes its case for a salary-cap-and-floor system, puts the long-term divide in even starker terms. Its analysis of results from 2005 through 2025 estimates that a fan of a team in the top half of baseball markets had a 50% chance of seeing that team win a World Series by age 12.

A fan of a team in the bottom half would have to wait until age 73.

The game of housing plays out over an even longer horizon, giving that financial advantage more places to show up.

Adults who grew up entirely in homeowner households were 18.4 percentage points more likely to own a home by age 35 than those raised entirely by renters, according to a Realtor.com® analysis.

And that advantage compounds. Using decades of household data, Realtor.com found that buying a first home by the early 30s was associated with 22.5% more net worth by age 50—about $119,000—than buying in the 40s, even after accounting for differences, including income, education, and marital status.

A more balanced market can hide who has been pushed out

It illustrates a problem with the way we judge whether the housing market is getting better.

Because by many measures, conditions have improved. Active inventory climbed above 1.16 million homes in September and moved closer to pre-pandemic levels. Price cuts have become more common. Buyers in many markets have more choices and negotiating leverage than they did during the COVID-19 pandemic-era frenzy.

But those measures tell us what the market looks like to people still able to participate while obscuring how many potential buyers have already fallen out of it—and there's mounting evidence that many would-be players have been benched.

Home purchase mortgage originations fell from roughly 3.6 million in 2019 to 2.8 million in 2025—a decline of about 22%. Compared with the 2021 boom, when originations reached roughly 4.3 million, they were down about 35%.

Among adults aged 18 to 45, the number moving into homes they owned was more than 26% lower in 2024 than in 2021, according to a recent Urban Institute analysis.

And among buyers younger than 35 who remained, the pool became more financially advantaged.

The share buying without a mortgage rose from 7.7% in 2018 to 10.2% in 2024. The share putting at least 20% down climbed from 23.9% to 27.4%. Meanwhile, the share earning no more than 80% of their area’s median income fell from 33.7% to 28.9%.

The Brewers can beat the Dodgers without disproving the advantage that comes with a $339 million payroll. In the same way, buyers can gain leverage without the housing market becoming more accessible.

Baseball is now debating whether that kind of imbalance requires rewriting the rules. And while housing has no true equivalent, the comparison adds weight to conversations playing out across the country about how to fix the market.

To truly level the playing field, housing may have to look beyond supply and mortgage rates to the wealth gap between buyers—and how that gap grows over time.