Home prices only go up! If only pundits and experts in the real estate industry read history they wouldn’t repeat it so much!
In the last 223 years of real estate and land values they fallen at least 13 times. That’s an average of one every 17 years.
We had home and land values fall in 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, WWI, 1929, early years of WWII, 1949, 1958, 1974, 1981, 1991, and the last one they actually lived through and care to remember 2007.
An asset and real estate is an asset like every other asset, has the ability to fall. It tends to fall when we have stock crashes, defaults, bank runs, higher rates, credit tightening, global geopolitical conflicts, recessions, and depressions.
What usually makes them rise is low rates, loose lending, government grants and regulation, and devaluation of the currency. History is stuck in a loop. it repeats itself.
The causes are different from bank runs and stock market crashes in 1837, 1857, 1873 and 1929, to a bad crop and a coup in Argentina with over speculation of land in South Africa and Australia that leads to bank run on gold by European investors in 1893, to world wars, to high inflation and resulting higher rates in 1981, and to over financialization of MBS through derivatives and loose lending in 2007.
No matter the causes, the bad debt and credit tightening that follows brings asset prices down.
To simply say home and land values only go up is just ignoring history. They go up because we print more money. So until you see more money printing we should just hold our breath and hope that what is going on today (falling prices) is not like what has happened 13 times before in the last 223 years.