No. of Recommendations: 3
Often you see home prices and rents conflated when someone is talking about affordability. They can be, but there are elements to both that can be viewed separately.
After years of near-zero Fed fund rates, housing prices kept going up and up:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfundsFrom ~March of 2008 until ~September of 2022 the Fed rate was ~2.5% or less with a lot of that time being essentially zero. That led to cheap mortgages and coupled with other effects saw home prices rise. Recent increases in the rate have made mortgages more expensive and we're finally starting to see housing prices fall, especially in condos.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/condo-prices-are-f...Rental markets are also affected by population...and since we've started actually enforcing border laws, illegals are packing up and leaving. And that's leading to more supply of housing...and rents are now dropping:
https://mxmnews.com/article/5bff36a1-7cb8-4481-9af...Speaking on Fox Business Channel, Bessent pointed to fresh rent data showing apartment prices fell 1.1 percent compared to a year ago and are now down 5.2 percent from their 2022 peak, when housing costs were surging nationwide. Bessent argued the decline isn’t accidental, but the predictable result of reversing what he called years of “unfettered immigration” that flooded local housing markets and forced working Americans to compete for limited supply. Citing a recent Wharton School study, Bessent noted a near one-to-one relationship between population growth and rent increases, saying the research found that “every one percent increase in population” translated into roughly a one percent rise in rents. 