alt Hacker NewsA drop in housing prices might be the only silver lining if an actual recession hits (whether the official statistics will actually admit to a recession is debatable of course).
That said, even if housing prices drop materially and eventually bottom it will provide little opportunity for "normal" folks to buy in if they're jobless. Will be interesting to see if Fed interest rate cuts translate to mortgage rate cuts, and whether those rate cuts lessen any price drops.
I've said this before on here, but the historical price-to-income for housing has been something like 4x. Today it's 7x (that is as insane as it sounds). A long way to revert to the mean unless you really think "this time is different."
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What I am worried about is won't building new homes slow down to a crawl or stop completely if the r word is confirmed?
People say this a lot, but it makes no sense to me. A recession comes with lower incomes and wealth for everyone, so affordability doesn't change for the average person. It only increases it for those who had a short position in their asset allocation, but that's just investment outperformance which you can have even without a recession.
It's 7x these days largely due to the 0% interest rate environment we had for so long.
Be very careful what you wish for. That's not much of a silver lining.
Desirable metros seem to have very sticky prices. San Francisco, where I lived for 15 years, turned into a grotesque caricature of what it once was, but prices barely budged (and for most of that transition, they surged wildly). Sure, it's no longer the single most expensive rental market in the country, but it's still one of the highest despite quality of life degrading massively and even a big decline in population.
Housing prices dropping aren’t so good for those who own homes. It is also likely there will be a feeding frenzy of investors snatching up homes. I had a hard time buying a few years ago, because investors kept out-bidding me with all-cash offers. I had to raise my price target to move outside of their impulse buy range, which I was not too happy about.