FOMO Helped Drive Up Housing Prices in the Pandemic. What Can We Expect Next?

Existing home prices in the United States soared 45 percent from December 2019 to June 2022, when Covid emerged and then gripped the nation. That rate of increase over such a short interval had never happened in the history of the U.S. national home price index, dating back to 1987, which the economist Karl Case and I first developed.

Now that growth in the index has started falling on a month-to-month basis, with the annual growth rate down from 18.1 percent in the year ending in June 2022 to 15.8 percent in the year ending July. This may seem a small drop, but it is important to note because it’s the largest deceleration in the history of the index and comes in the face of strong momentum in home prices. It leads one to consider whether the forces behind that 45 percent increase are going to continue.

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