Spend about 5 minutes online searching for news about the housing market, and odds are you’ll see something pop up about home prices. You may even stumble onto social media influencers saying we’re headed for a crash. Let’s get you the context you need.
The truth is prices are going to vary depending on where you live. But they're not crashing.
Here’s what you need to know.
The Local Perspective: Home Price Trends by Area
The biggest thing feeding into the confusion online is how different home price trends are by area right now. Take a look at this data from ResiClub and Zillow (see graph below).
About half of the largest metros are seeing prices go up.
The other half are seeing some declines.
Unfortunately, the online chatter only focuses on the markets where prices are down – and that makes it sound like something bigger is happening.
But, as you can see in this graph, that’s only one side of the story. The full picture is different.
The National Perspective: Moderate Price Growth
As a country, when you average it all together to get a true baseline, one thing becomes clear, home prices are still net positive at the national level.
According to the Redfin, national home prices were up about 1% year-over-year in February. So, what we’re seeing right now isn’t a collapse. It’s a market that’s normalizing after a period of unusually fast growth. And that impacts some local markets more than others – particularly those where prices rose too far, too fast during the
