Real Estate Tracker: What the US Housing Market Is Doing, in Dollars

Existing plus new home sales, annualized. The May 2026 pace of 4.77M is the 21st percentile of the combined series — activity, not price, is where the rate shock landed.

The composition tells its own story: new homes as a share of everything sold. Builders can cut prices and buy down mortgage rates — resale sellers sitting on 3% loans can't — so builders captured an unusually large share during the 2023-25 freeze — the 12-month average peaked above 14%, higher than anything in 2008-2019 — though the latest monthly reading has eased back toward its long-run middle.

Zillow's typical-home value is the fastest dollar-denominated national price series. Price growth of +0.8% against ~3% wage growth means real home prices are currently falling — the slow-motion affordability adjustment that follows every payment shock.

The monthly principal-and-interest payment on the typical home (20% down, 30-year fixed). This is the series that explains the frozen market: the payment roughly doubled between 2021 and 2023 and has barely eased since. Buyers experience payments, not prices — and sellers locked into ~3% mortgages experience the same math in reverse, which is why so few homes are listed.

The most important split on this page: the housing overhang is concentrated with builders, not homeowners. New-home supply at 10.3 months is the 97th percentile of six decades — recession-era territory — while resale supply sits at just 4.6 months, a broadly balanced market. Reading the new-home number alone would badly overstate how oversupplied US housing is: existing homes are ~88% of all sales.

The resale shelf itself: active for-sale listings bottomed near 700K in the 2022 frenzy against a ~1.5M pre-pandemic norm — the rebuild since is inventory normalizing, not (yet) distress.

And the construction pipeline, split the way the market splits — because new-home sales cover only single-family houses, while the multifamily rental pipeline is a different market on a different cycle. Completions running above starts means a pipeline draining: future supply thinning in real time.

The Fed's Z.1 accounts value the owner-occupied housing stock at $48.8T: $34.9T owned outright by households, $13.9T owed on mortgages. The equity share — 71.6%, the 84th percentile since 1945 — is the single cleanest difference from 2007, when the share had already eroded to ~60% before prices broke. High equity plus ~2% delinquencies means almost nobody is forced to sell; that is how a frozen market stays a frozen market instead of becoming a crash.

The stress gauge on that balance sheet: the share of single-family mortgages at banks that are past due. At 1.89% it sits in the 21st percentile of its 35-year history — the 2010 peak above 11% is what an equity-starved housing market looks like when prices break. Forced selling needs borrowers who can't pay and can't sell their way out; today's equity cushion removes the second condition.