Soaring Home Prices STILL Below 2008 Bubble?

Sobering yet mostly unnoticed fact is that the current housing price inflation has failed to lift many homes to the previous peak just before the market’s crash in 2008. Will suddenly cooling home prices extend the Back to the Future wait?

In fact, the WSJ cites a Zillow study showing “in 477 US cities, the typical home value at the end of April [2022] was BELOW peak levels from the early 2000s.” My Sweet Home Chicago, we’re told, is just “one of the US cities with wide disparities in home-price appreciation from neighborhood to neighborhood.”

That’s not to say the housing boom of the past two years didn’t propel US home prices to record highs throughout the country. Still, in hundreds of cities, today’s “read hot market hasn’t yet brought back prices to where they stood about 15 years ago.” AND, if the latest government & industry figures on the recent cooling off of home sales AND its affect on prices (thanks to rising mortgage interest rates) is accurate, recouping the lost value since that earlier bubble may have to wait longer still.

Davd Soul