Quote from @Marcus Auerbach:
Clearly the market is softening, but I don't think we will see meaningful national price decreases 2023.
Home prices are downward sticky. Sellers will just not sell if they don't get what they want. After 2008 we had 6 million foreclosures flood a market that normally sees little over a million new construction inventory. And they "had" to be sold, that was not a choice. Plus most had zero equity and were leveraged to the gills. And we had oversupply and weakening demand.
Unless we find somewhere 5 million homes we did not know about or kill 20 million people, national prices will not go down in a meaningful way. We may see the the number of transactions shrink dramatically, tough times for agents.
It is very possible that markets like the Midwest will develop better than the rest of the country, especially some markets that have seen an exuberance like Austin, TX. My market (Milwaukee) has gone up barley double digits, so we have appreciated just over inflation, there is no conceivable reason for prices to go down.
This. At the end of the day inventory is still low in many markets. There will be regions like Vegas in 08 (west coast looks far worse than east right now) but outside of those it’s hard to see massive corrections (10% won’t effect most of us in any meaningful way). Also people aren’t upside down and the builders were 100x faster this time to cut back on builds. Supply will remain limited.
Finally there is another factor not mentioned in this thread yet. People are talking about affordability, and for the average millennial it is down but we have the great wealth transfer coming, inheritance. It’s hard to not see them pumping it right back into homes.
Anyway I’m still buying (offer in Friday) just being a bit more picky. At end of day I don’t want cash sitting there, even if I am expecting some of these homes to lose $50-$100k value ($700k target purchases right now).
