U.S. housing is splitting

The United States housing market is no longer moving in one direction: prices are falling in some boomtowns while rising in cheaper Midwestern metros. (aei.org) The American Enterprise Institute said national home-price growth slowed to 1.1% in the 12 months through February 2026, the weakest reading in its series since 2012. Its metro gap widened to 18.2 percentage points, from Kansas City, Missouri, up 8.6%, to Cape Coral, Florida, down 9.6%. (aei.org) That is a sharp turn from the pandemic boom, when lower mortgage rates and migration pushed places like Austin, Phoenix, Dallas, Miami, and Las Vegas far ahead of older Midwest markets. Fortune, citing the same American Enterprise Institute data, said Austin prices doubled from $297,000 in late 2019 to $593,000 at the 2022 peak, while several Rust Belt metros gained only 25% to 33% in that stretch. (fortune.com) Rents are telling a different national story. Zillow said the typical asking rent was $1,895 in February, up 1.9% from a year earlier, the slowest annual increase since December 2020. (zillow.com) That cooling does not mean renting is cheap. Zillow said a household still needs about $76,000 a year to afford the typical rent, nearly $20,000 more than before the pandemic, even after the share of income spent on rent eased to 26.3%. (zillow.com) The national averages are also masking a supply split. Zillow said multifamily rents rose 1.4% in February, single-family rents rose 2.6%, and 39.2% of listings offered concessions such as free rent or waived fees as apartment completions and “accidental landlords” added supply. (zillow.com) The for-sale market is loosening at the same time. Realtor.com said March marked the fifth straight month of year-over-year list-price declines nationally, and prices were flat or falling in 34 of the 50 largest metros. (realtor.com) Milwaukee shows how mixed that can look on the ground. Realtor.com data published by Yahoo Finance said active listings there rose 16.8% in March from a year earlier and new listings rose 16.7%, but the median list price still climbed 7.0% to $229,900 and homes spent a median 33 days on market, versus 57 days nationally. (finance.yahoo.com) More inventory in Milwaukee has not produced a buyer’s market yet. The share of listings with a price cut rose to 18.2%, up 6 percentage points from March 2025, showing that sellers who overshoot are getting corrected even as well-priced homes still move quickly. (finance.yahoo.com) Zillow expects more of this unevenness through 2026. It forecasts existing-home sales to rise 4.3% to 4.26 million, home values to increase 1.2% nationally, and mortgage rates to stay above 6%, leaving the country with one housing market in name and many local ones in practice. (zillow.com)