“I think you’ll see a lot of people take the wait-and-see approach,” Wilk said. “People don’t understand it, they don’t know everything that’s in there. People will take that step back and say, ‘What does this mean for me?’”

The bill will mean different things to different people. The overwhelming majority of the country won’t be impacted by reducing the mortgage interest deduction from $1 million to $750,000, seeing as the median mortgage in the country is closer to $200,000. In the Boston area, it’s a different story.

“In our market, where the average price is significantly higher than much of the country, the mortgage interest deduction is a concern,” said Nick Warren, managing broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. “The cost of a property goes up because of that. Our price is already so high that it would be a significant amount of the savings they’re losing.”

While much of the overall criticism of the tax bill was that it favored the wealthy, the mortgage interest deduction is one change that will hurt well-off homebuyers. One benefit of moving the cap to $750,000 is that it spares many first-time buyers, who are already feeling quite the pinch in a market like Boston’s.

“At least it gets us away from most of the first-time homebuyers,” said Marie Presti, president of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors and a board member of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. “The middle-tier buyers in greater Boston, it still impacts them a bit. The middle tier, $750,000-to-$1.5 million homebuying people may not look to buy as much of a high-price home. It could impact sales.”

Indeed, experts have predicted that the tax bill could impact the national housing market as a whole, causing home values to fall anywhere from 9 to 14 percent. In greater Boston, however, there are other factors in play that will likely shield the area from the higher end of that prediction. One such factor is that supply in the area has remained at historic lows: MAR reported that inventory in October was down 25 percent from the year before, creating demand that has dramatically increased prices and has priced some out of homebuying altogether.

Supply

Like much of the rest of the country, low inventory has plagued the greater Boston real estate market for some time now, and the issue is expected to continue to dominate the market in 2018.

“We’ve had a real dearth of inventory lately,” Wilk said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to keep that inventory up so prices can remain somewhat reasonable and your average buyer has a chance to get the house they want.”