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.
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