Here is a chart from Residential Club showing home price changes in America's 50 largest metro areas.
The month-over-month figure is between August and September 2025. The year-over-year figure is between September 2024 and September 2025. And the "shift since 2022 peak" is the change in home prices since each market's respective 2022 peak (not always the same date apparently).
A number of things stand out.
The month-over-month figures do not look encouraging. The vast majority of markets have gone negative. Of course, one month does not make a trend. The year-over-year column (which is how this table is sorted) looks more balanced, but the national average is still at 0%.
The most prominent outliers in the negative direction are New Orleans (which has been uniquely flat since the start of the pandemic in March 2020), San Francisco and Phoenix (which have both seen a double digit percentage drop since the peak), and Austin (which is down over 25% since the peak).
Austin is a prime example of what happens when you bring a lot of new housing supply to a market — prices come down. Earlier this year we spoke about apartment rents being down 22% from their August 2023 peak. These effects are also being heightened by increased outmigration from the city (previously the fastest growing US metro area).
Back to the office, I guess.
Even with the declines since 2022, most markets remain up significantly, with many smaller markets like Buffalo and Hartford continuing to show strong year-over-year gains. It is interesting to me that over 5 years later, we are still working through the market distortions brought about by the pandemic. The market is searching for a new equilibrium.
Since 2005, LSE Cities (London School of Economics) has been collecting comparative data on how global cities perform in terms of key spatial, socioeconomic, and environmental indicators.
This is their latest data matrix:
To be clear, it is not a ranking of cities. It is intended to help us better understand how different cities around the world are performing.
Depending on how you're consuming this post, the text may be difficult to read. So here's what each column represents, moving from left to right:
Current population in the administrative city (millions)
Current population in the urban agglomeration (millions)
Average hourly population growth of urban agglomeration 2015 to 2030 (people per hour)
Administrative city area (km2)
Average density of built-up administrative area (people/km2)
GDP per capita in urban area ($, PPP)
Percentage of country's GDP produced by the metro region
Population under 20 (%)
Murder rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants)
Percentage of daily trips made by public transport
Percentage of daily trips made by walking & cycling
Car ownership rate (per 1,000 inhabitants)
CO2 emissions (tonnes per capita)
If you'd prefer to download a full PDF of the chart, click here.
Here's a chart from Knight Frank's 2019 Global Affordability Monitor that I think you'll find interesting:
It compares real home price growth and real household income growth (after tax) over the last 5 years for 32 world cities. The bolded percentages represent the former and the non-bolded percentages represent the latter.
Consider the variations here.
Amsterdam saw a real home price change of 63.6%, but a household income change of only 4.4% (although the circle looks to be in the wrong spot if this number is correct).
Moscow, on the other hand, saw flat home prices (0.1%) and a 22.7% increase in household income.
Though San Francisco is the star in terms of income growth.
Sao Paulo, unfortunately, saw a dramatic decline in both home prices and incomes. It's in the bottom left corner.
When I look at this chart, I don't see a strong correlation between household incomes and home prices. And the proportions of the chart tell you that the y-axis is moving more than the x-axis.
But if the top number exceeds the bottom number, then you could come to the conclusion that housing affordability has gotten worse over the last 5 years.