A Turning Point for the Housing Market?

Dave:
The housing market is cooling down along with the weather as the realities of a housing correction setting realities that include more uncertainty but also include more opportunity. Inventory is getting better, affordability is actually starting to improve and more and more deals are starting to make sense. But to capitalize on these opportunities, you can’t just guess. You need to understand what’s happening in the market so you don’t catch a falling knife, and instead get yourself into deals that move you one step closer to financial freedom. Today, I’ll give you all the intel you need to buy right in the current market.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thank you all so much for being here for today’s November housing market update. My name’s Dave Meyer. I’m the head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. I’ve been a rental property investor for 15 years and I am also a data analyst, which means I spend a lot of time studying the housing market and I totally get that not everyone is like me and looks at this kind of stuff all day. I get that most people get into real estate for time freedom, not to spend their time looking at charts or reading the news all the time, but I got to tell you, understanding the market is really crucial. To be honest. I think it’s what’s going to separate people who are going to continue to do well in the next couple of years from those who are going to struggle.
So on today’s episode, I’m going to provide an update on the housing market because it really is changing week by week. At this point, we’re going to talk about inventory days on market and how these shifts can actually benefit you as an investor. Next we’re going to talk about a surprising good news update in the internal battle to wrestle some affordability back into the real estate market. So let’s jump into this. First up, let’s just talk about what’s happening with prices. I’ve been talking about this for a while now, but I believe that we are in what would be called a housing market correction. Now we’re definitely not in a crash because actually according to most sources right now, prices for homes at least nominally not inflation adjusted are up year over year. So that shows that we are not in any super significant any sort of crash like that.
Redfin currently has us up about 2% year over year. When you look at other metrics, Zillow or realtor.com, it’s one, one and a half, but we’re basically somewhere close to flat or even for the majority of markets in the country. We are starting to see some signs though that this trend of slowing appreciation because remember last year it was closer to three or 4% nationally. The year before that it was closer to six or seven. The year before that it was crazy, but basically over the last couple of years we’ve just seen appreciation go from unusually high levels at like ten eight percent back down to what the last two years have been, much more close to normal, but we’re seeing signs that it’s going to slow even further, which is why I think we’re in a correction. Just as an example, we’re starting to see listing prices start to drop in October last month we have data for 20% of homes listed had price reductions, which was up a little bit over September.
It was closer to 18.5%. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a one month jump in the housing market, that’s actually pretty high and this is happening all over the country. One of the things we’re going to talk about today is that over recent years we’ve seen a lot of divergence in the housing market just in 24 and 2025, Midwest Northeast tended to remain pretty hot while the south and the west were a lot cooler, but right now, if you actually look at these list price changes, you see even in the Northeast, it’s zero. It’s perfectly flat year over year in the Midwest, it’s actually up still. That’s the only place it’s still up, but it’s up less than 1% 0.8%. In the south, it’s down 1% and in the west weakest right now for this metric is down negative 2.6%. So price drops are an important metric, but I do always want to caveat this one metric by explaining that this is the price that sellers are asking for, not necessarily what people are paying.
Like I said, what people are paying is still up year over year, but it does seem that sellers are getting a little bit more realistic and I think this is a good sign for people who want to be buying in the market now or in the next couple of years because we’ve been in a weird standoff for a couple of years now where buyers know that things were too expensive, it wasn’t realistic to pay what sellers were asking for with current interest rates, with current rent growth being kind of sluggish and sellers weren’t willing to come down on price. And so we’ve been in this stuck market and that hasn’t resolved yet, but I do think the sign that people are listing their properties for slightly lower than they were a year ago is a step in the right direction and I think to me means that there are going to be better deals at better values for real estate investors to come.
So I know that a lot of people or in the media you might see these headlines that say, oh my god, prices are dropping. The housing market is in free fall. No, it’s not. Prices are still up year over year, but it does mean that the value you can get in the housing market, which as investors we should always be looking for the value is slowly starting to improve a little bit. Now, why is this happening? Why are prices starting to go down? That all comes to inventory inventory if you’re not familiar with the term is just a measure of how many properties are listed for sale at any given point and during the pandemic it got really, really low and that was what led to all that rapid appreciation because think about that for a second. When there’s not a lot of inventory, but a lot of people want to buy, they’re going to compete for those few homes on the market.
They bid up those prices. That’s what happened during much the pandemic. We are now switching to what is basically the opposite happening where there are more sellers in the market than there are buyers. For example, inventory just went up for the 24th consecutive month, so we got two years straight of year over year inventory growth. We have seen the number of actively listed homes now is up 15% year over year. So what does that mean for you as a real estate investor? It means that you have more optionality. Basically when you go out to look for properties, you have 15% more to look at. Now that might still be really tight in your market if you’re living in the Midwest or the Northeast Inventory is still pretty well below pre pandemic levels. In fact, nationwide across the whole country, we’re still 13% below where we were before the pandemic.
So it’s not like things are exploding, and that’s a really critical point when you hear people pointing to the fact that we were heading for a crash. We were still well below where we were pre pandemic level and that was a relatively normal market, but things are getting closer to healthier. There is more inventory, and again, I think this is a positive thing for real estate investors just to look at some of the regional trends. What we’re seeing in the west, again, west and south inventory are growing the fastest 17% each. In the Midwest we got 12% growth, and in the northeast we have 9% growth. If you want to get really specific about it, we have 38% in Washington DC that is the highest, and I do think that is in part because of the government shutdown. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, Charlotte at 36% and Vegas at 35%.
But if you want to understand what’s going on in your local market, which you should because I cover the national market in these episodes because it is helpful, it does give you some tidbits, but you really need to understand what is going on at your local level. And so what I recommend to you, if you want to go do this for yourself and you can do it for free, I use Redfin most of the time. I think it’s a really easy website to use, just Google Redfin data center and they have a really easy to use tool to check out these things. I think what you want to look at right now is how inventory in your market compares to pre pandemic levels because looking year over year and saying, oh, it went up in my market 10%, that might sound like a lot, but it go from a hundred to 110 properties. That’s not really that significant. That’s not going to change your market. But if it went up 10 or 20% above pre pandemic levels, then that is a recipe for prices to fall. And we’ll talk about this more in a little bit because prices falling does not necessarily mean you can’t invest there, but it does mean you should probably take a slightly different approach. This week’s bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund, invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise flagship fund. Check out fundrise.com/pockets to learn more.
Now, before we move on, I just want to say one other about inventory, and this might sound a little bit confusing, but it’s super, super important here. Inventory has been going up year over year for the last 24 months like I said, but the amount it is going up by is slowing down. Just as an example, it was up 15% year over year in October, but in September it was 17%. In August it was 21%. In July it was 25%. In June it was 29%. So that rate of growth has been going down slowly, and I know this sounds nerdy and getting into the weeds here, but it is a critically important indicator that we are in a correction, but the full on conditions for a crash are not materializing. If there is going to be a crash, what needs to happen is this sort of snowball effect where inventory grows, then people start to panic or there’s foreclosures and they start listing more and more and more properties on the market and that supply keeps growing faster than the number of people who want to buy those homes, and that’s what can crash markets really quickly.
That’s not what’s happening. Instead, what is happening is over the last couple of years we’ve seen inventory start to rise towards more normal levels, but sellers are seeing that and they’re saying, you know what? This is shifting to a buyer’s market and I don’t really want to sell right now so they’re not listing at the same pace that they were in May or June or July. And so that is compressing inventory growth and this is exactly what you would expect to happen in a market that is correcting. Sellers do not have to sell. They’re going to choose not to. The only way the market really, really crashes is if sellers don’t have that choice and they are forced to sell because of either adverse economic conditions, maybe they lose their job and they can no longer make their mortgage payments. That would have to happen sort of at scale for the market to crash.
And although things can still change, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the labor market next year, but as of right now, the evidence, the data that we have, the actual information points to that we are in a correction and not a crash. Last thing I want to mention just talking about the general state of the market before we move on to talking about affordability is days on market. In October, we saw the average days that it takes for a property from the time you list it to the time it goes under contract to grow to 63 days. This is five days longer than it was last year, and is the 19th straight month where homes are taking longer to sell on a year over year basis. I should mention that 63 days is pretty close to the long-term average. It’s not anything crazy, but it is a very big difference from where we were a couple years ago.
Things were selling. Everyone knows this two weeks a week, sometimes a couple of hours. Now we’re back up to a much more normal level. So I should just mention if you’re a seller, if you’re flipping houses, you definitely want to budget for longer hold periods because things are just taking longer to sell. But if you’re a buyer, this again means more opportunity. It means that there are more sellers who are going to be more motivated to sell as those days on market start to pick up. It means that you can be more patient If you’re entering into a market, you can look at multiple deals, you can think about them for a week or two before making an offer. These are things that weren’t really possible over the last couple of years. And so as we go into this correcting market, buyers need to think about the things that benefit them about a buyer’s market, and this is absolutely one of them.
Again, where you are in the country is going to matter really dramatically. There are places in Florida that are really taking a long time to sell. Miami is at the highest right now. It’s almost 90 days. Orlando and Tampa are also up there. All the markets with a lot of inventory. So we also see Austin, San Antonio, Denver, Memphis, those are all slowing down, but if you look at Milwaukee, it’s like a third of that. It’s close to 30 days or Philadelphia or Columbus or Baltimore, San Francisco, even those are all on the lower end. So again, you need to do this research for yourself. You could do it for free, but this is the kind of information you should be looking at in order to inform the decisions you’re making about your portfolio. If you’re going to offer on a property and you’re in a really hot market, you can’t be as patient, you can’t low ball everyone.
If you’re in a market where there’s properties sitting for a really long time and prices are going down, you can be a little bit more aggressive with your offering strategy and try and get a better deal. So that’s what we got for that broad housing market buyer activity, not super great. Even though mortgage rates have come down a little bit for sellers, this is becoming a trickier market, but for buyers it does mean there’s going to be more opportunity if you really understand what’s going on in your market and you adjust your bidding strategy accordingly. Personally, I’m kind of excited right now. I’m getting stoked to buy rental properties and specifically I am really starting to look at doing more and more burrs right now because I think the burr is sort of the perfect thing to capitalize on the current market. It benefits from lower pricing, right?
Prices are coming down, but unlike flipping where you have this pressure to sell that quickly because this isn’t a good seller’s market a burr, you get the advantages of buying at a lower price, but you don’t have to sell it and you can wait until it’s a seller’s market again and sell it or just hold onto it for a long time. So that’s what I’m personally thinking about having looked at all this data. Now we need to talk more about another thing that I think is a bright spot right now for the housing market and the economy in general, which is housing market affordability. If you listen to the show, you listen to me on any platform that affordability is kind of the thing I think about the most when it comes to investing and the housing market in the last couple of years. The thing that has slowed things down and made things challenging as real estate investors is affordability.
Right now, housing is near 40 year lows for affordability. That’s basically means that for the average American, they can’t afford to buy the average priced home. Now, affordability actually is comprised of three different things. It’s home prices, it’s mortgage rates and it’s wages, how much people are earning, and those factors combine to dictate what affordability is at any given point. Now, housing is still unaffordable. I want to start this section by making it very clear that things have not gotten that much better, but my philosophy about all these things, being a data analyst, what you have to see is you have to see things sort of bottom out before they get better. And what we are starting to see in terms of affordability is that it’s getting a little bit better. This is particularly true in what is called real home prices or real affordability, which is inflation adjusted because even though as I said at the beginning of this show that home prices are up one or 2% year over year in real terms in inflation adjusted terms, they actually have been pretty stagnant or they’re actually declining on a national level since their peak.
Just think about that for a second. If we’re up one to 2% this year and inflation’s at 3%, which is the most recent reading that we have, that means that home prices in real terms, inflation adjusted terms actually went down 1%. And that is honestly kind of a good thing because that means it is getting more affordable because when we look at incomes, the amount that people are making in real terms in inflation adjusted terms, that is going up. Real wages, real household income is going up. So when you see improving income versus slightly negative inflation adjusted home prices, that means for the average American home prices are getting a little bit cheaper. Now, that is encouraging all on its own for anyone who wants to get into the housing market or who are investors who are in buy mode. The other piece of this though is mortgage rates.
And I know that a lot of people were falsely setting expectations that mortgage rates were going to come down a lot this year. I’ve been trying to caution people about that for at least a year now that they were not likely to come down in 2025. So far that has been accurate. I actually said a year ago I went back and listened to what my prediction for mortgage rates was going to be for 2025, and I said that in November and December of 2025, they would be in the low sixes between six and 6.5%. Were sitting right smack in the middle of that right now at about 6.3%. And although that’s not what people were saying, five and a half, 5%, it is down almost one full percentage point from where we were in January. January 15th I think was the day it peaked. This year it was about 7.2%.
Now we’re at 6.3, 6.25%, something like that. So almost a full percentage point. And although that doesn’t get us back to these levels that we were at between the great financial crisis in 2023, it is meaningful. It’s usually hundreds of dollars per month for the average mortgage. And so this is what’s encouraging to me about affordability. We are seeing home prices in real terms, flatten or decline a little bit. We’re seeing wages go up a little bit and we’re seeing mortgage rates come down a little bit. And these three things combined mean that for four consecutive months we are starting to see affordability improve. And I just want to mention that this is what I have been saying for years. I think it’s what the consensus view is from economists, housing market analysts is that affordability needs to get better. Everyone agrees we can’t have a healthy housing market functioning at 40 year lows for affordability, but what most people have gotten wrong is that it has to take either some dramatic drop in mortgage rates or some crash in home prices for affordability to get better.
There is a third option that I call the Great Stall. You’ve probably heard me talk about it on this podcast before, but the idea behind the Great stall is that affordability can get better, but it’s going to happen slowly. It’s going to happen from the combination of three things, real home prices, flat or slightly negative, mortgage rates modestly slowly improving, real wages continuing to go up, and that’s exactly what we are seeing right now. Now, I haven’t put together my forecast for what I think is going to happen in 2026 and beyond, but I’ll just tell you unless a couple of weird caveats happen, I think this is probably what we’re in for the foreseeable future. Now, there are some big economic things that can happen and throw that off course, which we’ll cover, but if things keep on the same path they’re on, this is likely what we’re going to see.
And for me, that is a good thing. We need affordability to improve in the housing market, and if I had to pick how that’s going to happen, I don’t want that to happen because home prices crash, I don’t even want that to happen because mortgage rates go down really quickly because that could lead to affordability problems in the future. I would rather see a gradual restoration of affordability, and that’s what we’re seeing and that’s something we can work with as investors. If you know this is happening, if you know the Great Stall is what we are in for the next couple of years, you can absolutely plan around that. You can come up with a strategy and a plan and tactics that work in this kind of market. And so for me, I personally find this encouraging. We have been in an unhealthy housing market for three years now, maybe more.
You can’t call the COVID market healthy either, so I would say we’ve been in an unhealthy housing market for five straight years now, and unfortunately the reality of the way the housing market works is we don’t get back to a healthy housing market without a little bit of pain. You can’t snap your fingers and all of a sudden we’re just back to normal. This is a big slow moving cargo ship and things need to move back and again for me, this is one of the better options out there. The better scenarios to play out is the great stall, and that is what is unfolding at least on paper as of now.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer going through our November housing market update. So just to summarize what we’re talking about sitting here in the middle of November, 2025, as we’re getting close to thinking about 2026, what’s going to happen next year? The housing market is taking an interesting turn. It is fully in a transition from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, and as I’ve said before, that comes with both risk but also a lot of opportunity. My best advice for anyone who wants to be buying right now, and I am starting to pick up my own interest in buying more and more right now is to really do research in what’s going on in your local markets. You need to have sort of two things in mind when you’re going about buying right now. First and foremost, how do I protect myself against the risk that comes in a buyer’s market?
That risk is falling asset prices. You don’t really want to buy something for 200 grand and then a year later it’s worth 180. That’s what you got to avoid. Now, you can do that in a couple of ways. You can do that by buying deep and making sure that you’re negotiating down to a level that you feel like even if the broader market declines for another year or so, you’re still buying at a good price. That’s probably the best way to do it. The second way to do it is to really just try and get an accurate assessment of whether prices are likely to drop in your area. If you’re in Florida, yeah, they’re probably likely to drop a little bit more. If you’re in the Midwest, you’re a little bit more insulated by that. You should look at this in terms of inventory and buyer demand.
See if things like days on market are going up, if inventory days on market list price, price drops are all going up, those are all signs that prices are likely to keep falling in your area. If those things have flattened out, they’re still below pre pandemic levels, maybe things aren’t going to grow a lot in the next couple of years. That’s kind of my opinion is we weren’t going to see any amazing appreciation for the next couple of years, but you’re probably insulated against that downside risk. So that’s the first thing thinking about is how to protect yourself against that risk. The second thing you should be thinking about is how do I position myself for opportunity? Because the opportunity is going to be there, and so the way I think about that is take what the market’s giving you. How do I find great assets that I can buy at a better price than I would’ve been able to buy them in a year ago or two years ago or three years ago?
Because if you’re a long-term buy and hold investor, buying great assets at great prices always makes sense. It kind of doesn’t even really matter about the market conditions if you’re holding onto it long-term. And then think about those upsides we always talk about on the show. Can you get rent growth? Can you buy in the path of progress? Can you get zoning upside? Can you earn a little bit of sweat equity by doing value add investing? Those are the things that are going to take you from getting a good deal today that over the five, 10 plus years that you’re going to hold this property, turn it from a good deal into an excellent one. That’s how I think about investing right now, and it’s what I think everyone should really be thinking about regardless of what market you’re in, that mindset is going to help you navigate this opportunity of risk, but also great opportunity. That’s what we got for you for November Housing Market Update here on the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. Thank you all so much for joining me on today’s episode. We’ll see you next time.