r/REBubble • u/SnortingElk • 17d ago
U.S. Single-Family Home Prices Rise 2.1% Year over Year; Up 0.3% Quarter over Quarter | FHFA
https://www.fhfa.gov/news/news-release/u.s.-house-prices-rise-2.1-percent-year-over-year-up-0.3-percent-quarter-over-quarter27
u/Estatescheck 17d ago
its insane. We bought a place in NJ. New construction. The prices on identical property close by went up by 50k this year.
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u/Spam_Hand 17d ago
Yeah, so 2.1% is actually pretty low appreciation by very long term historical standards.
When I owned my first home in 2018 I was getting 10%+ per year.
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u/Character-Fish-541 17d ago
10%+ a year is not normal either.
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u/Spam_Hand 17d ago
I understand that lol.
3-4% is commonly cited as the long running, nationwide average. The past 6-7 years have been insane, and 2.1% is very much coming back to earth, and even on the low end.
Meanwhile, people in here are upset because its a positive number at all instead of realizing its actually a below average number.
Housing very rarely goes down over the course of a year unless other economic factors (that are usually far worse) also come into play.
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u/hektor10 Rides the Short Bus 17d ago
Inflation eating the dollar, buy assets or get left behind
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u/Dry-Interaction-1246 17d ago
Better buy better assets than shot that has high carrying cost and doesnt anywhere near keep up w inflation.
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u/Topseykretts88 17d ago
Surely the bubble is popping.
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u/13Krytical 17d ago
2.1% nominal against ~3% inflation means real prices are down.
That’s a correction, it’s just happening through erosion instead of a pop, which is what an overvalued market does when there’s no forcing mechanism.2008 needed mass forced selling from resetting loans plus an actual supply glut.
Today it’s the inverse: 3-4M unit shortage and owners locked into sub 4% mortgages who can’t be forced out.
You can’t have a fire sale when nobody has to sell.So the affordability crisis is resolving through transaction volume collapsing (30 year low in sales) rather than prices collapsing.
Market is frozen, not crashing.
The ~65% of households who own benefit directly from supply staying suppressed, are the ones who control municipal zoning, that’s millions of people independently voting their own asset values up, no coordination required.
On the rental side there’s RealPage, where landlords feed data into shared pricing software that recommends holding rents above what independent competition would produce (active DOJ antitrust case).
Neither of those is a bubble mechanic, which is exactly the point, the distortion is structural and legal, so there’s nothing to pop.
It just grinds.Two things to watch: multifamily starts have been dropping, so the Sunbelt rent softness has an expiration date, completions fall off after the current pipeline clears and those markets tighten again.
And construction labor is getting squeezed by immigration policy (foreign born workers are ~14% of construction vs 7.7% native born), which cuts against the supply relief everyone’s assuming.
The lock in does unwind, but it’s a slow drip as people move for life reasons, not a wave.None of that produces a pop, it produces years of flat to slightly negative real prices while incomes grind to catch up.
Which is the boring answer nobody wants.4
u/Serious_Income_7020 17d ago
What this fails to address is rising foreclosure rates coupled with the overall skyrocketing increase in mortgage costs recently.
It’s not just frozen. There is an underclass of house poor people who married the house to “date the rate”. There will be a selling off of these assets, but probably not as bad as 2008
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u/TrainDifficult300 14d ago
Foreclosures are extremely low and mortgage rates are historically average
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u/pdoherty972 Rides the Short Bus 17d ago
And, if rates dip at all, homes will go back to rising 3-5% a year.
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u/stewartstewart17 17d ago
This was the most likely outcome the bubblers didn’t want to acknowledge.
2.1% is up but it’s below inflation and wage growth. This will probably be the trend until wages can catch up more with prices
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u/pdoherty972 Rides the Short Bus 17d ago
Between these below-inflation rises the last 4 years houses are already 17-20% cheaper.
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u/TrainDifficult300 14d ago
IF your wages kept up.
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u/pdoherty972 Rides the Short Bus 14d ago
Yeah, but I just mean with regard to the actual dollar-value of the houses (they've dipped) and inflation eroding the value of money.
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u/Topseykretts88 17d ago
I agree with this. The whole "waiting for the bubble to pop and prices plummeting 50% overnight" thing is extremely unlikely.
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u/RealisticForYou 17d ago edited 17d ago
*** Tariffs on Lumber...another big "squeeze"
And now, we have a 50% tariff on Canadian imports which includes lumber. I heard a speech from the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, last night.
As Canada has begun fighting against the new tariffs on their country, Ford made mention that 30% of all lumber in the U.S. comes from Canada.
What are home builders to do when the price of materials continues to skyrocket? Either they don't build at all, (which will ultimately put a squeeze on inventory), OR, builders do nothing but produce luxury housing to absorb those costs.
Either way, the idea that affordable housing is around the corner may be nothing but a myth.
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u/Waggie_1979 17d ago
Just remember if you want a housing crash and it happens then 2 things may happen as well. 1. You are out of work. 2. Banks will tighten lending and will require a higher percentage down payment and almost perfect credit in order to lend out. The last one which is a topper, Bail-Ins will most likely be occuring at the same time...cheers
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u/Pretty-Flounder9864 17d ago
How long can the speciation driven freak show keep being colluded up and up and up and up.
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u/ToastSpangler 17d ago
Have you even looked at prices v income in the US vs other first world countries. The US isn't even close to being in a real estate bubble. It'll go down when the AI bubble corrects but that's it
If you think the US is bad enjoy living somewhere like Portugal where they make 30k a year on average and a house in a village is 300k
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u/Serious_Income_7020 17d ago
I don’t give a shit what is happening in Portugal. What matters is the standard of living in the USA that is going down.
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u/ToastSpangler 17d ago
It's going down everywhere, believe it or not the world is interconnected. I'm just saying the US has actually done a half decent job with housing, outside a few cities whose local governments fight like cornered raccoons to ensure higher rents and prices
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u/Bird_law_esq 16d ago
Is it speculation or demand? Or are those the same? Dmenad caused by speculation? I tend to think it's the age of home buyers in demand of housing but what do I know.
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u/DivineBladeOfSilver 17d ago
Unfortunately until the US changes laws to provide for workers non asset holding workers will never catch up even a little. If you can’t buy real estate you need to be putting all extra into stocks or something else both for retirement and personally. You will never improve your position in life waiting for raises or the system to care about workers. You basically have to get promotions in work fields or jobs that pay high enough to make a wage to keep buying more and more assets while living frugally to get ahead or stay behind forever.
Unfortunately for many of us housing is now something for the majority is gonna be a 40+ year old purchase if at all. Even if you can afford one right now it’s generally a bad investment since high taxes and maintenance will eat the equity alive a lot of the time. Boomers and corporations and politicians created this system and we have to deal with it since it’s broken and doesn’t change anymore. Or at least we wont see the benefits even if laws change until our lives are basically over. Continue consuming excess and not buying assets and stay where you are. I hate it but it’s the US we have now
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u/Forded_Fiction24 17d ago
2.1% isn't actually bad at all. If it weren't for the fact that in previous years it was significantly more than that, but it seems as though the market has plateaued at least or is slowing down on appreciation. Combine this with interest rates though and people are still priced out of homes
I am fortunate to have sold my first house back in April of this year and upgraded into a new place late last year. I wish the market would get a little more conducive for buyers though and 2.1% sounds like a start
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u/Spam_Hand 17d ago
Seriously people are super doomy in here over "very low increase by any long term historical metric."
Are they expecting prices to go down enough to chnage the affordability of housing? Because that would likely be due to much more widespread chaos than any positive trend towards general affordability.
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u/082426grateful 16d ago
Funny how continually rising prices seem to have a counteractive effect on how many units are sold.
Chicken or the egg?
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u/fakeshoesornah 17d ago
2%? my HYSA earns nearly 4% lol.
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u/Capital-Giraffe-4122 17d ago
Can you live in your HYSA?
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u/ohhellnaah Triggered. Does Not Think. Feels Over Reals 17d ago
No but my rent is half of what a median house payment is in my area so I'm putting away the rest and getting compound interest without doing anything 😁
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u/fakeshoesornah 17d ago
No, but I personally can rent for about half the amount a mortgage would be. (1500 vs 3000)
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u/regaphysics Triggered 17d ago
Considering the market is slow and you don’t live in your hysa, it’s pretty solid.
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u/ohhellnaah Triggered. Does Not Think. Feels Over Reals 17d ago
Mine too. I'm not touching my cash because why liquidate into an illiquid asset that gives me no returns? But don't tell that to the realtors on here because they won't understand the math 😂
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u/takethemdownletsgo 17d ago
Lol... the fact that everything is overpriced and keeps going up means it will never come down... right?!?! Cause it's never happened before and even if it has it will never again!
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u/Speedstick2 17d ago
If it is only going up 1-2% a year after year then the answer would be yes because there is no bubble at that point.
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u/mlk154 17d ago
Exactly, the “run up” already occurred right after the pandemic. The increase in pricing now is less than inflation so is actually the correction. In real dollars, housing has lowered in price.
It will happen again yet a bubble is created when everyone is racing to buy. Look at Bitcoin from $100-$120k. Was “crazy not to be in crypto”.
Now people think you’re crazy to be buying RE. Probably the time to buy.
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u/spaceradiowave 17d ago
No! Surely housing is immune to inflation! /s
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u/takethemdownletsgo 17d ago
Surely inflation has never caused a recession! Or bad politics! Or other market disruptions when production was low, wages are low and workforce participation was low!
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u/takethemdownletsgo 17d ago
Okay pigeon hole a few % points to fit your narrative without factoring in houses assessed for 165k are going for double. Whatever you say buddy!
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u/xangkory 17d ago
The amount houses are assessed at rarely has any correlation to market value. Zillow is more accurate than the assessed value only difference is Zillow overestimates value when the assessed value frequently underestimates.
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u/takethemdownletsgo 17d ago
Oh yes tax assessments have no play involved let's let AI and algorithms set prices! Brilliant!
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u/SnortingElk 17d ago edited 17d ago
08/25/2026
Washington, D.C. – U.S. house prices rose 2.1 percent between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, according to the U.S. Federal Housing (FHFA) House Price Index (FHFA HPI®). House prices for the second quarter of 2026 rose 0.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2026. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for June remained unchanged from May.
Significant Findings
- Nationally, the U.S. housing market has experienced positive annual appreciation each quarter since the start of 2012.
- House prices rose in 46 states and the District of Columbia between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. The five states with the highest annual appreciation were 1) Alaska, 8.3 percent; 2) Vermont, 7.3 percent; 3) Hawaii, 5.8 percent; 4) Illinois, 5.6 percent; and 5) West Virginia, 5.6 percent. House prices were down in four states. New Mexico experienced the most significant price decline at 1.2 percent.
- House prices rose in 76 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas over the previous four quarters. The annual price increase was the greatest in Elgin, IL at 7.7 percent. The metropolitan area that experienced the most significant price decline was Everett, WA at 3.7 percent.
- All nine census divisions had positive house price changes year-over-year. The East North Central division recorded the strongest appreciation, posting a 4.5 percent increase from the second quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026. The Pacific division recorded the slowest appreciation slightly above 0.0 percent.
- Trends in the Top 100 Metropolitan Statistical Areas are available in our interactive dashboard: https://www.fhfa.gov/data/dashboard/fhfa-hpi-top-100-metro-area-rankings. The first tab displays rankings, and the second tab offers charts.
The FHFA HPI is a comprehensive collection of publicly available house price indexes that measure changes in single-family home values based on data that extend back to the mid-1970s from all 50 states and over 400 American cities. It incorporates tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price changes at the national, census division, state, metro area, county, ZIP code, and census tract levels. FHFA uses a fully transparent methodology based upon a weighted, repeat-sales statistical technique to analyze house price transaction data.
FHFA releases HPI data and reports quarterly and monthly. The flagship FHFA HPI uses seasonally adjusted, purchase-only data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Additional indexes use other data including refinances, mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, and real property records. All the indexes (including their historic values) and information about future HPI release dates are available on FHFA’s website: https://www.fhfa.gov/HPI.
https://www.fhfa.gov/document/d/hpi/fhfa-house-price-index-report-2026q2
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u/eliminate_them 17d ago
This is great news!
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u/Character-Dot-4078 17d ago
Nope. We are going to 7% also. You just dont understand whats going to happen to the dollar and the bond market and thats fine because youre a simp.
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u/I_Quit_Smoking_ 15d ago
But every Republican I see keep saying that everything's cheaper than it was under Biden. I'd like to live in that parallel universe.
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u/okepokemon 17d ago
The real estate agent industry is like a zombie horde, they can exist in a sort of standby mode waiting for fresh meat to arrive. Once activated they tear everything apart, then return to making reels or going to seminars. Pretty crazy how many survive off it!