Key takeaways
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Mortgage rates are high, but home prices keep rising — blame the lack of housing supply.
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Economists predict that any market correction will be modest and not on the scale of the Great Recession.
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Experts do not expect a housing market crash, due to low inventory, strict lending standards and other factors.
To the dismay of would-be homebuyers, property prices just keep rising. It seems nothing — not even some of the highest mortgage rates of the past two decades — can stop the continued climb of home prices. Are they destined for a fall? Here’s what the experts say about a potential housing market crash.
Market fluctuations
Prices increased once again in April, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which reports that median existing-home prices were up 5.7 percent over last year — the 10th month in a row of year-over-year jumps. In another reflection of ongoing increases, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller home price index for March was up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, representing the sixth all-time high in 12 months.
So much for the now-quaint notion that the post-pandemic “housing recession” would reverse some of the outsized price gains in homes. The U.S. housing market had finally started slowing in late 2022, and home prices seemed poised for a correction. But a strange thing happened on the way to the housing market crash: Home values started rising again.
— Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist, National Association of Realtors
NAR…
