The number of home sales in the United States peaked in 2021 at almost ************* after steadily rising since 2018. Nevertheless, the market contracted in the following year, with transaction volumes falling to ***********. Home sales remained muted in 2024, with a mild increase expected in 2025 and 2026. A major factor driving this trend is the unprecedented increase in mortgage interest rates due to high inflation. How have U.S. home prices developed over time? The average sales price of new homes has also been rising since 2011. Buyer confidence seems to have recovered after the property crash, which has increased demand for homes and also the prices sellers are demanding for homes. At the same time, the affordability of U.S. homes has decreased. Both the number of existing and newly built homes sold has declined since the housing market boom during the coronavirus pandemic. Challenges in housing supply The number of housing units in the U.S. rose steadily between 1975 and 2005 but has remained fairly stable since then. Construction increased notably in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the number of construction starts steadily rising, before plummeting amid the infamous housing market crash. Housing starts slowly started to pick up in 2011, mirroring the economic recovery. In 2022, the supply of newly built homes plummeted again, as supply chain challenges following the COVID-19 pandemic and tariffs on essential construction materials such as steel and lumber led to prices soaring.

Historical anecdotes of new investors being drawn into a booming asset market, only to suffer when the market turns, abound. While the role of investor contagion in asset bubbles has been explored extensively in the theoretical literature, causal empirical evidence on the topic is much rarer. This paper studies the recent boom and bust in the U.S. housing market and establishes that many novice investors entered the market as a direct result of observing investing activity of multiple forms in their own neighborhoods and that “infected” investors performed poorly relative to other investors along several dimensions.

The Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, was created by the U.S. congress in 1938, in order to maintain liquidity and stability in the domestic mortgage market. The company is a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), meaning that while it was a publicly traded company for most of its history, it was still supported by the federal government. While there is no legally binding guarantee of shares in GSEs or their securities, it is generally acknowledged that the U.S. government is highly unlikely to let these enterprises fail. Due to these implicit guarantees, GSEs are able to access financing at a reduced cost of interest. Fannie Mae's main activity is the purchasing of mortgage loans from their originators (banks, mortgage brokers etc.) and packaging them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in order to ease the access of U.S. homebuyers to housing credit. The early 2000s U.S. mortgage finance boom During the early 2000s, Fannie Mae was swept up in the U.S. housing boom which eventually led to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The association's stated goal of increasing access of lower income families to housing finance coalesced with the interests of private mortgage lenders and Wall Street investment banks, who had become heavily reliant on the housing market to drive profits. Private lenders had begun to offer riskier mortgage loans in the early 2000s due to low interest rates in the wake of the "Dot Com" crash and their need to maintain profits through increasing the volume of loans on their books. The securitized products created by these private lenders did not maintain the standards which had traditionally been upheld by GSEs. Due to their market share being eaten into by private firms, however, the GSEs involved in the mortgage markets began to also lower their standards, resulting in a 'race to the bottom'. The fall of Fannie Mae The lowering of lending standards was a key factor in creating the housing bubble, as mortgages were now being offered to borrowers with little or no ability to repay the loans. Combined with fraudulent practices from credit ratings agencies, who rated the junk securities created from these mortgage loans as being of the highest standard, this led directly to the financial panic that erupted on Wall Street beginning in 2007. As the U.S. economy slowed down in 2006, mortgage delinquency rates began to spike. Fannie Mae's losses in the mortgage security market in 2006 and 2007, along with the losses of the related GSE 'Freddie Mac', had caused its share value to plummet, stoking fears that it may collapse. On September 7th 2008, Fannie Mae was taken into government conservatorship along with Freddie Mac, with their stocks being delisted from stock exchanges in 2010. This act was seen as an unprecedented direct intervention into the economy by the U.S. government, and a symbol of how far the U.S. housing market had fallen.

This is not going to be an article or Op-Ed about Michael Jordan. Since 2009 we've been in the longest bull-market in history, that's 11 years and counting. However a few metrics like the stock market P/E, the call to put ratio and of course the Shiller P/E suggest a great crash is coming in-between the levels of 1929 and the dot.com bubble. Mean reversion historically is inevitable and the Fed's printing money experiment could end in disaster for the stock market in late 2021 or 2022. You can read Jeremy Grantham's Last Dance article here. You are likely well aware of Michael Burry's predicament as well. It's easier for you just to skim through two related videos on this topic of a stock market crash. Michael Burry's Warning see this YouTube. Jeremy Grantham's Warning See this YouTube. Typically when there is a major event in the world, there is a crash and then a bear market and a recovery that takes many many months. In March, 2020 that's not what we saw since the Fed did some astonishing things that means a liquidity sloth and the risk of a major inflation event. The pandemic represented the quickest decline of at least 30% in the history of the benchmark S&P 500, but the recovery was not correlated to anything but Fed intervention. Since the pandemic clearly isn't disappearing and many sectors such as travel, business travel, tourism and supply chain disruptions appear significantly disrupted - the so-called economic recovery isn't so great. And there's this little problem at the heart of global capitalism today, the stock market just keeps going up. Crashes and corrections typically occur frequently in a normal market. But the Fed liquidity and irresponsible printing of money is creating a scenario where normal behavior isn't occurring on the markets. According to data provided by market analytics firm Yardeni Research, the benchmark index has undergone 38 declines of at least 10% since the beginning of 1950. Since March, 2020 we've barely seen a down month. September, 2020 was flat-ish. The S&P 500 has more than doubled since those lows. Look at the angle of the curve: The S&P 500 was 735 at the low in 2009, so in this bull market alone it has gone up 6x in valuation. That's not a normal cycle and it could mean we are due for an epic correction. I have to agree with the analysts who claim that the long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. There is a complacency, buy-the dip frenzy and general meme environment to what BigTech can do in such an environment. The weight of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Nvidia and Tesla together in the S&P and Nasdaq is approach a ridiculous weighting. When these stocks are seen both as growth, value and companies with unbeatable moats the entire dynamics of the stock market begin to break down. Check out FANG during the pandemic. BigTech is Seen as Bullet-Proof me valuations and a hysterical speculative behavior leads to even higher highs, even as 2020 offered many younger people an on-ramp into investing for the first time. Some analysts at JP Morgan are even saying that until retail investors stop charging into stocks, markets probably don’t have too much to worry about. Hedge funds with payment for order flows can predict exactly how these retail investors are behaving and monetize them. PFOF might even have to be banned by the SEC. The risk-on market theoretically just keeps going up until the Fed raises interest rates, which could be in 2023! For some context, we're more than 1.4 years removed from the bear-market bottom of the coronavirus crash and haven't had even a 5% correction in nine months. This is the most over-priced the market has likely ever been. At the night of the dot-com bubble the S&P 500 was only 1,400. Today it is 4,500, not so many years after. Clearly something is not quite right if you look at history and the P/E ratios. A market pumped with liquidity produces higher earnings with historically low interest rates, it's an environment where dangerous things can occur. In late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, that seemed like a lot, but nothing compared to today. For some context, the S&P 500 Shiller P/E closed last week at 38.58, which is nearly a two-decade high. It's also well over double the average Shiller P/E of 16.84, dating back 151 years. So the stock market is likely around 2x over-valued. Try to think rationally about what this means for valuations today and your favorite stock prices, what should they be in historical terms? The S&P 500 is up 31% in the past year. It will likely hit 5,000 before a correction given the amount of added liquidity to the system and the QE the Fed is using that's like a huge abuse of MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. This has also lent to bubbles in the housing market, crypto and even commodities like Gold with long-term global GDP meeting many headwinds in the years ahead due to a...

In this paper, the authors set out to date-stamp periods of US housing price explosivity for the period 1830–2013. They make use of several robust techniques that allow them to identify such periods by determining when prices start to exhibit explosivity with respect to its past behaviour and when it recedes to long term stable prices. The first technique used is the Generalized sup ADF (GSADF) test procedure developed by Phillips, Shi, and Yu (Testing for Multiple Bubbles: Historical Episodes of Exuberance and Collapse in the S&P 500, 2013), which allows the recursive identification of multiple periods of price explosivity. The second approach makes use of Robinson’s (Efficient Test of Nonstationary Hypotheses, 1994) test statistic, comparing the null of a unit root process against the alternative of speced orders of fractional integration. The analysis date-stamps several periods of US house price explosivity, allowing us to contextualize its historic relevance.

Throughout the 1920s, prices on the U.S. stock exchange rose exponentially, however, by the end of the decade, uncontrolled growth and a stock market propped up by speculation and borrowed money proved unsustainable, resulting in the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. This set a chain of events in motion that led to economic collapse - banks demanded repayment of debts, the property market crashed, and people stopped spending as unemployment rose. Within a year the country was in the midst of an economic depression, and the economy continued on a downward trend until late-1932.

It was during this time where Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was elected president, and he assumed office in March 1933 - through a series of economic reforms and New Deal policies, the economy began to recover. Stock prices fluctuated at more sustainable levels over the next decades, and developments were in line with overall economic development, rather than the uncontrolled growth seen in the 1920s. Overall, it took over 25 years for the Dow Jones value to reach its pre-Crash peak.

The table shows the estimated coefficients of the heterogeneous agent model in Eq (13), using quarterly data on U.S. house prices and rents from 1960Q1 to 2014Q1. Robust standard errors are shown in parentheses below the estimates.*, **, *** denotes significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level.Multi-Agent Model Estimation Results.

Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank on Wall Street, declared bankruptcy on the 15th of September 2008, becoming the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The investment house, which was founded in the mid-19th century, had become heavily involved in the U.S. housing bubble in the early 2000s, with its large holdings of toxic mortgage-backed securities (MBS) ultimately causing the bank's downfall. The bank had expanded rapidly following the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which meant that investment banks could also engage in commercial banking activities. Lehman vertically integrated their mortgage business, buying smaller commercial enterprises that originated housing loans, which allowed the bank to expand its MBS holdings. The downfall of Lehman and the crash of '08 As the U.S. housing market began to slow down in 2006, the default rate on housing loans began to spike, triggering losses for Lehman from their MBS portfolio. Lehman's main competitor in mortgage financing, Bear Stearns, was bought by J.P. Morgan Chase in order to prevent bankruptcy in March 2008, leading investors and lenders to become increasingly concerned about the bank's financial health. As the bank relied on short-term funding on money markets in order to meet its obligations, the news of its huge losses in the third-quarter of 2008 further prevented it from funding itself on financial markets. By September, it was clear that without external assistance, the bank would fail. As its losses from credit default swaps mounted due to the deepening crash in the housing market, Lehman was forced to declare bankruptcy on September 15, as no buyer could be found to save the bank. The collapse of Lehman triggered panic in global financial markets, forcing the U.S. government to step in and bail-out the insurance giant AIG the next day on September 16. The effects of this financial crisis hit the non-financial economy hard, causing a global recession in 2009.

The Long Depression was, by a large margin, the longest-lasting recession in U.S. history. It began in the U.S. with the Panic of 1873, and lasted for over five years. This depression was the largest in a series of recessions at the turn of the 20th century, which proved to be a period of overall stagnation as the U.S. financial markets failed to keep pace with industrialization and changes in monetary policy. Great Depression The Great Depression, however, is widely considered to have been the most severe recession in U.S. history. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the country's economy collapsed, wages fell and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. It would take almost four years for recovery to begin. Additionally, U.S. expansion and integration in international markets allowed the depression to become a global event, which became a major catalyst in the build up to the Second World War. Decreasing severity When comparing recessions before and after the Great Depression, they have generally become shorter and less frequent over time. Only three recessions in the latter period have lasted more than one year. Additionally, while there were 12 recessions between 1880 and 1920, there were only six recessions between 1980 and 2020. The most severe recession in recent years was the financial crisis of 2007 (known as the Great Recession), where irresponsible lending policies and lack of government regulation allowed for a property bubble to develop and become detached from the economy over time, this eventually became untenable and the bubble burst. Although the causes of both the Great Depression and Great Recession were similar in many aspects, economists have been able to use historical evidence to try and predict, prevent, or limit the impact of future recessions.

After a period of rapid increase, house price growth in the UK has moderated. In 2025, house prices are forecast to increase by ****percent. Between 2025 and 2029, the average house price growth is projected at *** percent. According to the source, home building is expected to increase slightly in this period, fueling home buying. On the other hand, higher borrowing costs despite recent easing of mortgage rates and affordability challenges may continue to suppress transaction activity. Historical house price growth in the UK House prices rose steadily between 2015 and 2020, despite minor fluctuations. In the following two years, prices soared, leading to the house price index jumping by about 20 percent. As the market stood in April 2025, the average price for a home stood at approximately ******* British pounds. Rents are expected to continue to grow According to another forecast, the prime residential market is also expected to see rental prices grow in the next five years. Growth is forecast to be stronger in 2025 and slow slightly until 2029. The rental market in London is expected to follow a similar trend, with Outer London slightly outperforming Central London.

The average resale house price in Canada was forecast to reach nearly ******* Canadian dollars in 2026, according to a January forecast. In 2024, house prices increased after falling for the first time since 2019. One of the reasons for the price correction was the notable drop in transaction activity. Housing transactions picked up in 2024 and are expected to continue to grow until 2026. British Columbia, which is the most expensive province for housing, is projected to see the average house price reach *** million Canadian dollars in 2026. Affordability in Vancouver Vancouver is the most populous city in British Columbia and is also infamously expensive for housing. In 2023, the city topped the ranking for least affordable housing market in Canada, with the average homeownership cost outweighing the average household income. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but most residents believe that foreigners investing in the market cause the high housing prices. Victoria housing market The capital of British Columbia is Victoria, where housing prices are also very high. The price of a single family home in Victoria's most expensive suburb, Oak Bay was *** million Canadian dollars in 2024.

Average House Prices in New Zealand increased to 902020 NZD in October from 900521 NZD in September of 2025. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for New Zealand Average House Prices.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 was a period of severe macroeconomic instability for the United States and the global economy more generally. The crisis was precipitated by the collapse of a number of financial institutions who were deeply involved in the U.S. mortgage market and associated credit markets. Beginning in the Summer of 2007, a number of banks began to report issues with increasing mortgage delinquencies and the problem of not being able to accurately price derivatives contracts which were based on bundles of these U.S. residential mortgages. By the end of 2008, U.S. financial institutions had begun to fail due to their exposure to the housing market, leading to one of the deepest recessions in the history of the United States and to extensive government bailouts of the financial sector.

Subprime and the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market

The early 2000s had seen explosive growth in the U.S. mortgage market, as credit became cheaper due to the Federal Reserve's decision to lower interest rates in the aftermath of the 2001 'Dot Com' Crash, as well as because of the increasing globalization of financial flows which directed funds into U.S. financial markets. Lower mortgage rates gave incentive to financial institutions to begin lending to riskier borrowers, using so-called 'subprime' loans. These were loans to borrowers with poor credit scores, who would not have met the requirements for a conventional mortgage loan. In order to hedge against the risk of these riskier loans, financial institutions began to use complex financial instruments known as derivatives, which bundled mortgage loans together and allowed the risk of default to be sold on to willing investors. This practice was supposed to remove the risk from these loans, by effectively allowing credit institutions to buy insurance against delinquencies. Due to the fraudulent practices of credit ratings agencies, however, the price of these contacts did not reflect the real risk of the loans involved. As the reality of the inability of the borrowers to repay began to kick in during 2007, the financial markets which traded these derivatives came under increasing stress and eventually led to a 'sudden stop' in trading and credit intermediation during 2008.

Market Panic and The Great Recession

As borrowers failed to make repayments, this had a knock-on effect among financial institutions who were highly leveraged with financial instruments based on the mortgage market. Lehman Brothers, one of the world's largest investment banks, failed on September 15th 2008, causing widespread panic in financial markets. Due to the fear of an unprecedented collapse in the financial sector which would have untold consequences for the wider economy, the U.S. government and central bank, The Fed, intervened the following day to bailout the United States' largest insurance company, AIG, and to backstop financial markets. The crisis prompted a deep recession, known colloquially as The Great Recession, drawing parallels between this period and The Great Depression. The collapse of credit intermediation in the economy lead to further issues in the real economy, as business were increasingly unable to pay back loans and were forced to lay off staff, driving unemployment to a high of almost 10 percent in 2010. While there has been criticism of the U.S. government's actions to bailout the financial institutions involved, the actions of the government and the Fed are seen by many as having prevented the crisis from spiraling into a depression of the magnitude of The Great Depression.

The average Canadian house price declined slightly in 2023, after four years of consecutive growth. The average house price stood at ******* Canadian dollars in 2023 and was forecast to reach ******* Canadian dollars by 2026. Home sales on the rise The number of housing units sold is also set to increase over the two-year period. From ******* units sold, the annual number of home sales in the country is expected to rise to ******* in 2025. British Columbia and Ontario have traditionally been housing markets with prices above the Canadian average, and both are set to witness an increase in sales in 2025. How did Canadians feel about the future development of house prices? When it comes to consumer confidence in the performance of the real estate market in the next six months, Canadian consumers in 2024 mostly expected that the market would go up. A slightly lower share of the respondents believed real estate prices would remain the same.

The average house price in Nova Scotia in 2024 stood at approximately ******* Canadian dollars. In the next year, house prices are forecast to further increase by about five percent. Compared to other provinces, Nova Scotia ranked below the national average in terms of house prices. However, the average price of a house in Nova Scotia was twice lower than in Ontario or British Columbia. Exploding population growth in recent yearsNova Scotia is the second-smallest province after Prince Edward Island, and had a population of just under *********** in 2018. The population of this province was relatively steady between 2000 and 2015, but has taken off since then. This sudden growth may be a factor in the increasing house prices, as demand also increases due to the greater number of residents looking for homes. The future of housing affordability in Nova ScotiaHalifax, the provincial capital, had an affordable housing market as of 2018, with mortgage payments only constituting about ** percent of average household incomes. The number of housing starts in the region has increased in the past few years, which also suggests an increase in demand. Only time will tell whether this will ensure a sufficient supply of homes for the region in response to its growing population.