Zillow projects that U.S. home prices will fall 1.7% between March 2025 and March 2026. Last month, Zillow economists still thought prices would rise this year.
Thats -1.7% across the whole country.
The US housing bubble has popped.
Fs in chat for your local obscenely overleveraged corporate landlord or serial home flipper or AirBnB leaser, though be warned, they may be extremely emotional and/or delusional at the moment.
In that same time frame, Zillow expects the weakest home price appreciation to occur in these 10 areas:
Houma, LA: -10.1%
Lake Charles, LA: -8.9%
New Orleans, LA: -7.6%
Lafayette, LA: -7.5%
Shreveport, LA: -7.0%
Alexandria, LA -7.0%
Beaumont, TX : -6.6%
Odessa, TX: -6.3%
Midland, TX: -5.7%
Monroe, LA: -5.5Is this people discovering that being on the front lines of climate change isn’t going to be fun or something else?
No, you got it, a whole lot of the predicted losses are pretty highly correlated to areas that actuaries (who work for insurance companies and use highly advanced climate models based off of the science) predict will suffer increasing numbers and frequencies of climate disasters.
That’s definitely a major hurricane zone. A major storm hits that coast multiple times per decade. It’s worse than the east coast of Florida.
When you buy a house on the Louisiana/ Texas coast, you are buying at least 5 hurricanes over the next decade. I’ve been through many hurricanes in Florida, and even the mild ones are scary as Hell. The worst ones are absolutely terrifying beyond belief.
I can see why people leave, and wouldn’t want to buy there, but where else are you going to go? California has fires that destroy entire towns, and also earthquakes. The Midwest/Plains has tornadoes. The north has crippling blizzards. Even Hawaii had the Maui fire, and has volcanoes. Almost everywhere has the potential for floods, and there are several dormant volcanoes and earthquake faults in unusual parts of the country that could wake up any time, and ruin everybody’s day.
Weather is almost everywhere, and it hates humans.
Entirely seriously:
Minnesota.
Lots and lots of fresh water.
Fairly low CoL for a (hopefully) leans decently blue state.
Pretty darn low risk of climate change causing significantly worse and more frequent natural disasters.
The flood damage potential is actually not projected to increase significantly… nor are droughts and wildfires projected to be a serious problem.
Yeah, you get the blizzards, but… those are not projected to massively upscale to a point they’d be overwhelming the infrastructure, at least not yet in the next 10 years.
Also, despite the projected general housing downturn… Minnesota looks pretty uneventful in projections.
That would, to me, indicate an… actually stable economy generally, as compared to many other states that are much more prone to booms and busts, and thus massive wealth disparity.
Idk if I trust Zillow economists… This is the company that made an AI house flipping robot that bought houses for way too high over market price to easily secure the buy and then almost bankrupted the company because they couldn’t sell for a gain
i wonder what 6% apr says about underlying asset decreasing in price, probably nothing concerningWhat do you mean 1/3 of the country won’t be able to get home insurance within ten years?
Climate change?
That’s stupid.
You have to have home insurance to be able to pay a mortgage?
WTF that’s even more stupid!
Thankfully we can rest easy knowing the government will step in and do something, right?
Oh no, that was gasoline, not water!
I hope not. This current government is virtuosically incompetent, they’ll only make it far worse. I’ll take my chances with the Free Market, it has to be more trustworthy and less volatile.
House prices haven’t meaningfully gone down in 15 years and that was a monumental crisis when it happened then. I was just entering the workforce and had no capital to take advantage of the only reasonable house prices I’ve seen in my lifetime back in 2010. Hopefully those who have been waiting for prices to dip will be ready to pounce if prices do actually come down.
Housing Market Bear is the longer, scientific term for Hexbear
Check out this dope ass bear
Real estate is a pyramid scheme based on the deprivation of human need. The state will always prop up this violent scam for the sake of capital.
-1.7% is rookie numbers.
As someone in the market to buy a house right now 1.7% doesn’t really sound like a lot. Am I being too pessimistic?
As someone who will probably never afford a house because they’ve inflated beyond all semblance of reason, I’d need something closer to 50% to be remotely affordable, though I have a feeling that without systemic changes, a crash like that would just death spiral into chaos.
My plan is to pay off my trailer and then move it to a plot of land.
Might work! …if I keep my job through the next recession.
It will probably go down more over time, the problem is that the market has already been dominated by large home buying groups like Zillow and Black Rock and Berkshire Hathaway who can overbid cash on every home that goes up for sale. This will further consolidate property into the hands of the property owning class, not usher in a new period of people buying their own homes again. Especially if the dollar weakens and prices of necessities stay high, it will be less and less individual home buyers who have an opportunity to take advantage of any price drops.
You gotta realize how much financial loan leverage goes into the real estate market.
It may not seem huge to you as a single potential buyer… but a whole lot of people’s business models are based on ‘price always go up’ and set their margins and leverage accordingly.
That all unwinds, in a slow motion, much larger scale version of watching an idiot daytrader or cryptotrader lose everything in a flash from compounding margin calls.
The level of leverage isn’t nearly as high, but the level of actual money involved is insanely more.
Know anyone that is currently or will soon need to do a HELOC or other reverse mortgage type thing to pay for something?
Well they may now be even more fucked as their home depreciates.
I’m not in the market but do look and when you’re playing with hundreds of thousands of dollars, knocking off maybe 5k feels like peanuts to me, too
my wife works in lending, she does the paperwork and processing side and has for over 2 decades (we old)
the market downturn has been happening before this tradewar shit. the value of the dollar dropping, the uncertainty in the bond market, the lending rates, all that is a perfect shitstorm thats pointing towards a housing collapse again. we’ll be lucky if its just a bear market
But I want it to collapse… Every home in my area is selling at 120% of what it was bought for in 2016
it does need to collapse
it will mean unemployment for my wife whenever the market has a big downturn there are mass layoffs in her industry but what can you do
It’s awful how the most lucrative and available employment opportunities crop up around the most unstable bubbles.
its more unemployment opportunities than anything
Yep, there have been growing warning signs for about 2 years, with more and more areas piling up inventories, longer and longer times to close a sale, and actual amount of closed sales lowering… and then all the Trump induced insanity just kicked in the weak foundations.
The silver lining will be that these predatory financial corps that are been buying up all the housing inventory so they can force everyone into being renters at exorbitant rates (like Blackrock and Morgan), will be stuck with declining values on their inventory, and will take a bath. Good, fuck them.
What does a Housing Market Bear look like?
I presume it’s the merciless wild animal that murders me for being unable to afford housing.
…wait, no, that’s the police.
oh man I really hope this includes land I’ve been wanting to start a farm.
a lot of soybean farms will be going tits-up soon
That land is probably fried, would need a long period to rehab it
luckily I’m into hydroponics, if the land is amenable to solar panels then I can power a greenhouse with them and grow year round without caring about soil quality.
It’s true if you go that route you can grow immediately and also be rehabbing the soil on the side. Something similar has been a dream of mine before I realized it would be financially unobtainable. Culinary mushrooms grow great in storage containers as well. Really just need land in an area with a good water source
Nah, they’ll get bailed out, and be fine, like the last time.
last time it destroyed the industry so hard my wife was unemployed for 4 years… they dont bail out the unemployed
Even if they do it’ll just end up in bidding war with corporate farms
hope my parents can sell their house before this really starts happening
If your parents are anything like mine, they will gleefully ignore all sound advice designed to protect them financially or just improve their lives generally, even if they agree with the logic.
Because acknowledging that their child could possibly know more about anything than them on any subject would conflict with their … well, quite literally apocalyptic levels of paternalistic boomer narcissism.
But more seriously: check your local market conditions and projections, certain areas are still actually appreciating or mostly stable, but many areas are set for a significant decline.
… Its mostly, but not entirely, places that are going to be turbofucked by climate change intensified disasters in the next ten years.
Well that doesn’t sound frustrating at all!
I always questioned how my mum (UK) was a financial advisor of some sort and skint herself lol
Isn’t there at least some upside if they don’t?
housing prices dropping means that property taxes will go down. And that mortgage payments will also go down…right? right?
Mortgage payments definitely won’t go down, if they’re on a variable rate, they’ll go up.
Property taxes… might go down… but as far as I can tell, most property value assesors and assement methods and schedules are somewhere between… esoterically arcane and inconsistent… and just openly corrupt.
But sure, if you do get assessed lower, a year into all this, then your property taxes go down.
And then the local government realizes that their revenue has gone down, and then cuts services, govt jobs, goes into debt, and/or raises taxes on everyone other than the wealthy and infuential, who then go on to buy the foreclosures.
We’ve been watching house listings and prices in our area for more than a year on a week-to-week basis, and maybe about 3 or 4 months ago we noticed houses sitting on the market longer, and prices on those houses declining in our area. This seems inevitable, and considering how much of our economy is likely driven by the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector, this is very likely to keep dropping. It will probably have large knock on effects to in areas prone to weather related house damage as insurance companies pull out of those regions. How much are you willing to pay for a house you absolutely can’t insure?
Yep, you’ve got it.
This could get really ugly, really fast.
I am of the opinion that the housing market crash might not last very long, if inflation really picks up.
I cannot believe I am saying this, but uh… yeah, with this level of general government idiocy and chaos, hyperinflation may actually be a probable outcome.
The USD is tanking internationally, and … welp, gotta keep making these international debt payments somehow, and the oldest trick in the book for that is just hyperinflation.
… And Trump keeps saying he can or will fire Jerome Powell … and then the Federal Reserve is no longer independent, and basically all the economists just shrug and give up.
Whoo boy this is gonna suck.
We are in the Prologue right now, the real story hasn’t even begun, and we are already having serious issues. Right now it’s all speculation and fear.
By next summer, when the results of these incredibly irresponsible and incompetent policies are bearing real actual results, we are going to be in serious trouble on every governmental and societal front.
Protests will be huge, HitlerPig will encourage his RedHats to instigate violence, and he will call on Hegseth to use the military to quell the violence with even more vicious violence at multiple protests around the country. Then he will declare Martial Law and suspend the 2026 Midterm elections in order to avoid the certain electoral bloodbath, and preserve his Congressional majorities, keeping the Democrats from controlling investigative committees with subpoena and arrest powers.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride.
Sounds like a pretty reasonable projection to me.
