Zillow turns full-blown housing market bear—just look at its new forecast
fastcompany.com
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?
1.7% YOY decrease is a bubble popping?
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.
The housing market almost never goes down year-over-year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case%E2%80%93Shiller_index
Case–Shiller home price index data, inflation adjusted, 1890–2018.
He probably meant that it almost never goes down in nominal, ie, non inflation adjusted terms, yoy.
What you have posted is:
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.
Yes.
The bubble pops when the price growth stops, and goes negative.
'The bubble' is basically the idea that prices just keep going up forever.
Based on that idea, financing, loans, leverage happens.
When the fundamentals no longer represent the bubble mindset, everyone whose personal budgets or business relies on prices just going upward, forever, are now margin squeezed, and potentially margin called depending on how overleveraged they are.... because you based your ability to pay the debt on your loans you used to purchase the property... on the idea that your property and thus rent prices would just keep going up.
Now, your property is actually worth less, and thus so is the amount of rent you can charge... but your debt payments are still the same.
You hold out as long as you can, but all around you other property owners are cutting their losses and selling at lower property values, which further reinforces the idea that your own property isn't worth the rent you are charging for it.
EDIT:
There are a lot of underlying fundamentals that drove Zillow's projection, which are broadly addressed in the article.
But it is also worth mentioning that a single month ago, Zillow was projecting a modest 0.8% growth for the year forward.
Then Trump decided to greatly aggrevate the economic situation, and things downturned so fast that 0.8% growth turned into -1.7%.
The fundamentals have been building up to a breaking point for a while now, huge inventory numbers, much more time on market till a sale, sellers offering many kinds of concessions, significant lossess in the stock prices of major homebuildets...
But then Trump did the Tariff nonsense, and also decided to deport all the brown people to a gulag, cause an overt constitutional crisis, and destroy the USD as the de facto world currency... and in doing all thjs, he essentially popped the bubble himself.
Trumps actions in one month shifted the growth projections for a whole year by -2.5%.