home prices – Live Laugh Love Do http://livelaughlovedo.com A Super Fun Site Sun, 31 Aug 2025 04:58:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 The housing market is no longer a wealth-building engine as home price slump http://livelaughlovedo.com/finance/the-housing-market-is-no-longer-a-wealth-building-engine-as-home-price-slump/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/finance/the-housing-market-is-no-longer-a-wealth-building-engine-as-home-price-slump/#respond Sun, 31 Aug 2025 04:58:28 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/08/31/the-housing-market-is-no-longer-a-wealth-building-engine-as-home-price-slump/ [ad_1]

High home prices and mortgage rates have created unaffordable conditions for many Americans, but the housing market’s ability to create more wealth has sputtered.

That’s because even as home prices continue to hover around record levels, they are also edging lower and lagging behind the rate of inflation, which has heated up amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

“For the first time in years, home prices are failing to keep pace with broader inflation,” said Nicholas Godec, head of Fixed Income Tradables & Commodities at S&P Dow Jones Indices, in a statement on Tuesday. The last time that happened was mid-2023.

The latest S&P Cotality Case-Shiller home price data showed that the 20-city index fell 0.3% in June from the prior month, marking the fourth consecutive monthly decline.

On an annual basis, the 20-city composite was up 2.1%, down from a 2.8% increase in the previous month, and the national index saw a 1.9% yearly gain, down from 2.3%. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose 2.7% in June from a year ago.

“This reversal is historically significant: During the pandemic surge, home values were climbing at double-digit annual rates that far exceeded inflation, building substantial real wealth for homeowners,” Godec added. “Now, American housing wealth has actually declined in inflation-adjusted terms over the past year—a notable erosion that reflects the market’s new equilibrium.”

Weak prices suggest underlying housing demand remains muted, he said, despite the spring and summer historically being the peak period for homebuying.

In fact, this year’s selling season has been a bust. While sales of existing homes have ticked up recently, they are still subdued and prices are flat. In addition, sales of new homes are slumping with prices down.

Conditions have been so dire that Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi sounded the alarm on the housing market even louder last month.

In Godec’s view, the recent shift in the housing market could represent a new normal—but one that also has a positive angle.

“Looking ahead, this housing cycle’s maturation appears to be settling around inflation-parity growth rather than the wealth-building engine of recent years,” he said.

That’s as pandemic-era hot spots in the Sun Belt have cooled off with demand increasingly tilting toward established industrial centers that enjoy sustainable fundamentals like employment growth, greater affordability, and favorable demographics.

“While this represents a loss of the extraordinary gains homeowners enjoyed from 2020-2022, it may signal a healthier long-term trajectory where housing appreciation aligns more closely with broader economic fundamentals rather than speculative excess,” Godec added.

Meanwhile, analysts at EY-Parthenon sounded gloomier about the housing market in a report that also came out on Tuesday, predicting that home prices will turn negative on an annual basis by year-end due to low demand and rising inventories.

Home listings are up 25% from a year ago, and inventories have risen for 21 consecutive months. Homebuilders are also cautious given that demand is under pressure and construction costs are still elevated.

“Looking forward, the housing market is expected to stay stagnant, as slowing income growth and persistently high borrowing costs continue to limit demand,” the EY report said. “While proposed changes to the regulatory environment can help improve builder sentiment, elevated construction costs due to higher tariffs along with ample inventories will continue to constrain construction activity.”

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These states are seeing the biggest housing market inventory shift http://livelaughlovedo.com/career-and-productivity/these-states-are-seeing-the-biggest-housing-market-inventory-shift/ http://livelaughlovedo.com/career-and-productivity/these-states-are-seeing-the-biggest-housing-market-inventory-shift/#respond Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:09:29 +0000 http://livelaughlovedo.com/2025/07/10/these-states-are-seeing-the-biggest-housing-market-inventory-shift/ [ad_1]

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter.

When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings could suggest a market that is heating up.

Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that shift has varied significantly.

Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has jumped above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months.

Where is inventory heading deeper into summer? As ResiClub communicated to ResiClub PRO members in late 2023—and reaffirmed last fall—we expect national active inventory to approach pre-pandemic 2019 levels in the second half of 2025. That’s still the trajectory we’re on.

National active listings are on the rise (+28.9% between June 2024 and June 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some sellers markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyers markets.

Nationally, we’re still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-11.3% below June 2019) and some resale markets, in particular big chunks of Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight-ish.

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June inventory/active listings* total, according to Realtor.com:

  • June 2017 -> 1,292,371 📉
  • June 2018 -> 1,216,504 📉
  • June 2019 -> 1,219,807 📈
  • June 2020 -> 871,557 📉
  • June 2021 -> 492,425 📉 (overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom)
  • June 2022 -> 573,650 📈
  • June 2023 -> 614,326 📈
  • June 2024 -> 839,992 📈
  • June 2025 -> 1,082,520 📈

IF we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+242,528 homes for sale), we’d have:

  • 1,325,048 active inventory come June 2026
  • 1,567,576 active inventory come June 2027

Right now, we’re looking at state inventory data. (ResiClub PRO members [paid tier] will get our monthly deep dive analysis looking at inventory shifts and signals for over 800 metro areas and 3,000 counties.)

Below is the year-over-year percentage change by state.

Click here to view an interactive version of the year-over-year map below

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While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places too).

As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. That’s where home sellers this spring had, relatively speaking, more power.

In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sun Belt and Mountain West, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda and Austin. Many of these areas saw major price surges during the Pandemic Housing Boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Tampa and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices. This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new home supply in the Sun Belt.

Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable deals. That puts additional upward pressure on resale inventory.

In recent months, that softening has accelerated again in West Coast markets too—including much of California.

Click here to view an interactive version of the map below

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At the end of June 2025, 10 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia—which we left out of this analysis—is also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels too. Weakness in D.C. proper predates the current admin’s job cuts.)

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Big picture: Over the past few years we’ve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the Pandemic Housing Boom. While home prices are falling in many pockets of the Sun Belt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets saw a little price appreciation this spring. That said, given the current softening, ResiClub expects that as the year progresses, more markets will fall into the year-over-year decline camp.

Below is another version of the table above—but this one includes every month since January 2017.

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If you’d like to further examine the monthly state inventory figures, use the interactive below. (To better understand ongoing softness and weakness across Florida, read this ResiClub PRO report.)

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