archivePatrick S. Duffy

With the national median home price surpassing $400,000 since March 2023 and just 37.7% of existing homes sold during the fourth quarter of 2023 deemed affordable to families earning the median income of $96,300, it’s certainly understandable that would-be homebuyers might be hoping for a price crash in order to grab their first rung on the housing ladder. Similarly, existing owners might be trying to time the market to maximize their equity gains versus risking a decline.The average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage interest rate reached more than 7% in October and...

Key Takeaways: While the 20 top hottest housing markets are again located in Colorado, North Carolina, Florida and Texas, they’re also located in Tennessee, Oregon, Georgia and Arizona. Three of the top five hottest markets in both June and December were Durham, Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, mostly thanks to strong buyer demand and relatively high affordability. Markets to watch that improved the most between June and December 2023 include Cleveland, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Detroit. Cleveland's HMI score jumped 8.8 points to 62.3, mostly due to a rise in...

Key Takeaways: The most overvalued markets to purchase a home tend to be located in California, but also include popular vacation home markets in Hawaii, tech-centered Seattle, Washington, and pandemic-era “Zoomtowns” including Greeley, Colorado, and Boise, Idaho. The most overvalued markets to rent a home mostly include markets in Hawaii, California, New York, Florida and South Carolina. You’ll pay more to buy a median-priced home versus renting in several California MSAs as well as in Hawaii, Washington, Colorado and Utah. In the pre-pandemic days of late 2019 and early 2020,...

Over the next five years, although some trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to influence real estate and land use, other factors will also gain in importance. Among those are an aging population, the rising costs of climate change, a more unstable world and the expansion of artificial intelligence into new corners of the economy. As a consequence, even if the housing market gradually unfreezes as mortgage rates slowly decline from 2023's highs, the hottest housing markets in 2028 may look a bit different from early 2024.This is...