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.
The US Housing bubble has popped.
Everyone remembers how well that went last time, right?
The housing market almost never goes down year-over-year, so it’s reasonable to assume that when it starts to it signals big trouble in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case–Shiller_index
He probably meant that it almost never goes down in nominal, ie, non inflation adjusted terms, yoy.
What you have posted is:
Not actual nominal prices, it is the case-schiller index, which is calculated with different weighting and methods than Zillow is using.
This is inflation adjusted, real values, again, not nominal prices.
Looks like this is a data point at each month, when we are talking about blocking out and aggregating entire years and representing them as one data point.
When looking at more granular data, you’re more likely to see more movement. When you’re looking at less granular data… a projected yoy decline is a much bigger deal.
Thats a lot of words to say: You are not doing an apples to apples comparison.
That would look like this:
Apologies for whipping up this shit tier graph from FRED, im on a shitty phone.
Orange or Rust is actual nominal prices, blocked out year by year.
Blue is the nominal change in yearly prices, I would have liked to made it a centered % change graph in the middle, but FRED doesnt do that in its web renderer.
But you can still see any time the blue is… below zero.
And that is, historically, pretty rare, only happening in 7 (or 8?) years of nearly a century of data.
Yeah, I suppose that’s fair. He was specifically using it in the context of illustrating whether-or-not this figure was bad or not.
I just have a knee-jerk irritation reaction when I see people saying “the housing market always goes up”, because it’s usually in conjunction with someone advising someone to put a ton of money into real estate, where the graph I provided is a more-relevant one.
Glad you agree!
=)
Also I just realized we both assumed Libra is a he.
Whoops!
The housing market almost doubled prices during COVID. I don’t think it’s unexpected that prices would settle down and readjust in the years following.
Except it is unexpected, if you ask basically 90% of realtors, and the vast majority of analysts following the housing market, untill… well basically right now.
The whole schtick is that houses prices always go up, never down, that price growth may slow but never actually go negative.
I pointed this out to my other reply to you, but uh yeah, the fundamentals have been blaring more and more warning signs for years, but perception is key, so the vast majority of people who report market projections are incentivized to paint a far too rosy picture…
… And then reality becomes too difficult to ignore, and perceptions shift rapidly.
Zillow, a month ago, was projecting a modest, nationwide growth of 0.8%.
Now, a month later, Trump actually does the stuff he repeatedly said he was going to do, but the market just assumed he was either bullshitting or had a more robust and thought out plan…
And suddenly the delusions are eviscerated, and a month later, 0.8% gets moved downward -2.5% to a -1.7% projection.
These people did not see this coming until it smacked them in the face.
Almost no one was projecting an actual decline, publically, untill very recently, and if you were projecting a decline 6 months ago, you would have either been dismissed or laughed at by the experts.