Hope Leitner, Realtor®, CRS

  The Return of Normal Seasonality for Home Price Appreciation If you’re thinking of  making a move , one of the biggest questions you have right now is probably:  what’s happening with  home prices ?  Despite what you may be hearing in the news, nationally, home prices aren’t falling. It’s just that  price growth  is beginning to normalize. Here’s the context you need to really understand that trend. In the  housing market , there are predictable ebbs and flows that happen each year. It’s called seasonality. Spring is the peak homebuying season when the market is most active. That activity is typically still strong in the summer but begins to wane as the cooler months approach. Home prices follow along with seasonality because prices appreciate most when something is in  high demand . That’s why there’s a reliable long-term home price trend. The graph below uses data from  Case-Shiller  to show typical monthly home price movement from 1973 through 2022 (not  adjusted , so you can see

  September 5, 2023 Toward the end of last year, there were a number of headlines saying   home prices   were going to fall substantially in 2023. That led to a lot of fear and questions about whether there was going to be a repeat of the housing crash that happened back in 2008. But the headlines got it wrong. While there was a slight home price correction after the sky-high price appreciation during the  ‘unicorn’ years , nationally,  home prices  didn’t come crashing down. If anything,  prices  were a lot more resilient than many people expected. Let's take a look at some of the expert forecasts from late last year stacked against their most recent  forecasts  to show that even the experts recognize they were overly pessimistic. Expert Home Price Forecasts: Then and Now This visual shows the  2023  home price  forecasts  from seven  organizations . It provides the original 2023 forecasts (released in late  2022 ) for what would happen to  home prices  by the end of  this year  a