A client texted me last week. She'd been scrolling through her feed and landed on a video from some guy with a ring light and a confident voice telling her the housing market was about to collapse. She wanted to know if she should wait to list.
I told her what I'm going to tell you.
Turn off the noise for a second. Let's look at what the data actually says.
Here's the thing about housing market headlines — they're almost always true somewhere and misleading everywhere else. Right now, about half of the largest metros in the country are seeing prices rise. The other half are seeing modest declines. Both of those things are happening simultaneously, in different places, for different reasons.
The internet focuses almost exclusively on the markets where prices are softening. That's what gets clicks. But that's only half the story, and it's not the half that reflects what's happening nationally.
When you average it all out, national home prices were still up about 1% year over year as of February according to Redfin. That's not a crash. That's a market catching its breath after one of the most aggressive run-ups in modern real estate history. The markets seeing the steepest declines right now are largely the ones where prices shot up the fastest and furthest during the pandemic. They're correcting, not collapsing.
The comparison to 2008 gets thrown around a lot online, and it needs to stop.
2008 was a nationwide price collapse driven by fundamentally broken lending — millions of loans made to buyers who couldn't afford them, built on inflated valuations with no real foundation. What we're seeing today is nothing like that. Fannie Mae surveyed more than 100 housing market experts on exactly this question, and the consensus is clear: prices are expected to grow every year nationally through at least 2030. Moderately, yes. But consistently upward.
Even the markets currently experiencing mild softness aren't expected to stay there. According to that same Fannie Mae survey, 85% of experts believe those markets will return to positive price growth before the end of 2027. The dip, where it exists, is expected to be temporary.
Redfin's chief economist put it plainly — gradual price growth over time is normal, and that's exactly what the data projects from here.
So what does this mean for you as a seller?
It means the window to act from a position of strength is still open — but the market is no longer as forgiving of overpriced listings as it was in 2021. Buyers are more cautious now. They're doing more research. They're watching the same headlines you are, and some of them are using those headlines as negotiating leverage whether the data supports it or not.
The sellers who win in this environment are the ones who price strategically from day one, market aggressively, and understand exactly what their local market — not the national average, not a viral video — is actually doing.
That's the conversation worth having.
If you want to know specifically what's happening in your neighborhood right now, let's sit down and look at the real numbers together. Not headlines. Not predictions. Your street, your square footage, your market.
— Ryan
