Housing market news and data for 2026: home prices, inventory, days on market, and buyer demand — plus what the latest trends mean for buyers and sellers.
KB Home opened the first phase of Sandstone, a nearly 300-acre master plan in North Las Vegas, Nev., that will hold more than 1,500 homes priced from the $300,000s — the builder’s largest new-home community in 10 years.
The August Employment Situation report beat forecasts by a wide margin and revised June and July higher, pushing the Federal Reserve further from a rate cut. Construction added 22,000 jobs, with residential trades gaining and nonresidential building slipping.
Investors accounted for 27% of U.S. single-family home purchases between March and June, down from 28%, Cotality reported. The headline share barely moved, but the volume underneath it did: investors bought about 40,000 fewer homes than a year earlier, and the largest landlords accounted for a quarter of that drop.
Mortgage rates reached a 13-month high, new listings hit their highest level since 2022, construction spending slipped again, and Rocket named a new chief executive at Redfin. Here are the eight stories that shaped the week in real estate.
A holiday-shortened week with one release that matters: August CPI lands Friday morning, the last major inflation reading before the Fed meets Sept. 15-16. Fed officials are in blackout all week, so the data will have to speak for itself.
New listings climbed 8% year over year to the most since August 2022, but demand stayed flat as mortgage rates crept back toward 7%, according to Redfin data for the four weeks ending Aug. 30.
NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index for the second quarter shows single-family construction contracting almost everywhere while apartment building concentrates in large metro cores and suburbs.
Redfin data published Wednesday shows San Francisco’s median sale price up 6% to $1.6 million with inventory down 18.4%, while Seattle’s price fell 3.6% and listings rose 16.7% — a split the brokerage ties to where AI money is landing.
A hawkish Jackson Hole debut, sticky PCE inflation, a 10.5% drop in new home sales and the end of RE/MAX as an independent company — the week’s biggest real estate stories in one place.
Construction spending Tuesday, Freddie Mac’s rate survey Thursday and the August jobs report Friday — the last full data week before the Fed’s September meeting.
New single-family home sales fell to a 607,000 annual rate in July, but only the Midwest’s 42.7% collapse and a rise in unsold inventory clear the Census Bureau’s statistical significance test.
S&P Cotality Case-Shiller and FHFA both showed home prices accelerating modestly in June, but housing lost ground to inflation for a 13th straight month and the Midwest-West gap kept widening.
Two years after the May 2024 derecho and Hurricane Beryl, the city began taking applications Monday for repair grants of up to $100,000 and full reconstruction of up to $300,000.
Active listings across Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria, Va., rose nearly 20% year over year while national inventory fell — and the region’s median price went the opposite direction from the country’s.
Closed sales dropped to roughly 11,700 from 13,000 in June, and the statewide median slipped to $330,000 — though prices remain 4.7% above a year ago and listings are still tighter than last summer.
The governor gave the Texas Department of Insurance until Sept. 14 to recommend further changes, and ordered five immediate actions including a ban on price optimization and a prohibition on non-renewals based on a home’s age.
Builders who started five or fewer homes last year reported a 9.1% median increase in material costs, while builders with 100 or more starts reported 1.8% — a gap that helps explain why consolidation keeps accelerating.
The fire that started Saturday near Verdi remains at zero containment, with damage assessments still pending across neighborhoods on the western edge of the Reno housing market.
The hurricane-resistant Punta Gorda community that survived Hurricane Ian without losing power will host a new Southwest Florida Resilience Accelerator launching in October, as new home sales climb nearly 30% this quarter.
BevyHouse is testing whether factory-built homes can cut Altadena’s wildfire rebuild timeline from 18 months to six, delivering a five-module house near Fair Oaks Avenue.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Arizona water officials brace for a federal rule reallocating Colorado River water, with economists warning mandated cuts could slow homebuilding in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metros.
Median listing prices fell 2.4% year over year in July as sellers priced more realistically from the start, cutting delistings and pushing contract signings to their highest level since 2022.
Massachusetts House and Senate bills tackle zoning reform through different routes — YIGBY on religious land versus statewide duplexes-by-right — after rent stabilization was knocked off the table by the courts.
Redfin data shows Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth have all tipped into buyer’s-market territory, with Houston posting the widest seller-buyer gap in the state.
San Jose’s City Council directed staff to draft rules raising Residential Neighborhood density from 8 to as many as 32 units per acre. The mayor’s memo cites the risk of losing Housing Element certification.
Single-family starts plunged, mortgage rates eased for a second week, the $876 million commission settlements survived appeal, and Real and RE/MAX cleared the way for a Monday closing.
Californians for Homeownership and the California Housing Defense Fund filed three suits Aug. 20 alleging San Diego, San Francisco and Montebello unlawfully narrowed Senate Bill 79, the state’s transit-oriented housing law.
The FTC’s antitrust trial against Zillow and Redfin opens Monday alongside the Real-RE/MAX closing, Case-Shiller and new-home sales land Tuesday, and the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium convenes Thursday.
Single-family attached starts totaled 42,000 in the second quarter, down 9% year over year, pulling townhouse market share off its 2025 record high while staying well above historical norms.
Home discounts peak in late August across much of California, Austin and New York suburbs, and in September across Texas, Houston, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., a Redfin analysis found.
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