What that means is after years of a housing market in which not a lot of people were buying or selling, more sellers are coming back than buyers. It’s tipping the scales in the favor of buyers, where home prices dip and available homes for sale linger longer. The backdrop of economic uncertainty stoked by the president’s tariff agenda, which previously fueled a selloff in the stock and bond markets, is only compounding things. Buyers might pull back more, further forcing sellers’ hands.
If Zillow’s forecast comes to fruition, it would be the first time home prices fell on a national level, on an annual basis, since the Great Financial Crisis. There was a blip two years ago in June 2023, but it was only a 0.2% slip and was only negative for that month. Before that, the last time home values were negative year over year was June 2012, and they fell year over year every month from July 2007 to then; that five years of decline totaled 23.1%.
At the moment, “it is a very different environment,” Zillow senior economist Kara Ng told Fortune. She later said, “It’s not a bearish forecast.” This time around, it won’t be that homeowners are forced to sell, the way they were during and after the financial crisis, but because buyers are skittish and aren’t returning to the housing market in the same numbers that sellers are after being sidelined, she said.
