If you’re new here, I’m Keith. I founded Get Rich Education, host one of the longest-running and most listened-to real estate investing shows, serve on the Forbes Real Estate Council, and am a 20-year real estate investor.
Fourteen months ago, I published GRE’s 2022 National Median Housing Price Appreciation Forecast right here in this letter, predicting 9%-10% for the year.
Real estate data moves slower than glaciers sometimes.
But we’ve got the 2022 number from the NAR here. It came in at 10.2%.
How was I so close?
I’ve been doing this stuff for a while. I evaluated the current direction of home prices, housing supply, new building permits, mortgage rates, demography, affordability, and more.
It took a little luck too, .
At times, I have underestimated the strength of the real estate market.
In 2019, real estate values were stable and not appreciating.
At that time, I said, “I don’t see what will make real estate appreciation rates shoot higher.”
Then something occurred that no one could foresee–the pandemic.
Then… virtually no one realized that a pandemic would correlate with hotly appreciated house prices either.
What do I expect for 2023 national home price appreciation? Stable values. They won’t rise or fall significantly.
- Why won’t they rise fast? Affordability constraints
- Why can’t they fall fast? Supply constraints
Of course, real estate markets are local.
We avoid most high-priced coastal markets, which I call the “volatile markets”.
We focus on the cash-flowing Midwest and South, which I call the “stable markets“.
This underscores the fact that our core areas expect little 2023 price movement.
Last week we learned that Q4 GDP still showed solid growth at 2.9%, beating most expectations.
It reflected both high employment and high consumer spending.
That surely frustrated all the people saying that we would be in a recession by now.
I have never said any such thing, even debating a podcast guest last summer that told me, “We’re already in a recession.”
Recession predictions have become as common as learning that a politician has a stash of classified documents at home.
Some have even wrongly predicted a meteoric dinosaur-killing-level economic collapse by now.
Melancholy headlines and clickbait get more attention than accuracy does.
Tech layoffs are just going back to employment levels of 6-12 months ago. That’s more spectacle than significant.
This doesn’t mean that everything is grand.
High inflation keeps debasing the quality of life for the lower and middle class. 64% of consumers live paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet, a labor shortage persists.
The world’s most powerful nation has galactic-sized debt.
We might enter a mild recession later this year.
On February 1st, 2023, the Fed announces their first interest rate decision of the year. Many feel that they’ll shrink the raise to a quarter-percent.
Their previous six hikes were all 2-3x larger.
Going forward, remember that a recession correlates closely with lower interest rates, not higher ones.
Many think that the last recession was in 2008. It occurred in 2020.
Recessions occur every five years, on average. We’ll surely have another one sometime.
They’re merely a normal part of the business cycle, just like “new normal”, “synergy”, calling a company a “family”, and the next crop of inane business buzzwords.
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