What's Going On With the Real Estate Market Right Now?

If you’ve been paying attention to real estate headlines this summer, you’ve probably noticed they can’t seem to agree on much. One says the market is slowing down. The next says prices are climbing. Someone on the news is still predicting a crash, and meanwhile, your neighbor just sold their house in a week.

So what’s actually going on?

I pulled the latest national data to cut through some of that noise, because the real story this summer is actually pretty straightforward once you look at the numbers.

Home prices are steady. The national median home price is sitting at $417,800 right now, which is up less than 1% from last summer. That’s a far cry from the double-digit jumps we saw during the pandemic, and it’s not a correction either.

We’re in a period of genuine stability. Prices do tend to peak during the summer months, and that seasonal pattern is holding, but the days of runaway appreciation pricing people out of the market are behind us for now. Whether you’re buying or selling, steady prices give you room to make a thoughtful decision instead of a reactive one.

Rates are better than they were a year ago. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate is averaging around 6.5%, down from nearly 7% last summer. That might not sound like a dramatic shift, but it’s brought a meaningful number of buyers back into the market.

Every fraction of a point changes what someone can comfortably afford on a monthly payment, and that improvement has been enough to get people off the sidelines. Nobody expects rates to return to the 3% range anytime soon, but the gradual downward trend has been one of the more encouraging developments of 2026.

Affordability has actually improved. This is the part that surprises people. Even with prices at a record high, homes are more affordable than they were a year ago, because wages have been growing faster than home prices. The national affordability index has climbed to 102.3, up from 95.5 last summer, and it has improved in every region of the country.

Inventory is sitting at about 4.6 months of supply, which is roughly where it was a year ago and still below the 5 to 6 months most economists consider balanced. So buyers aren’t drowning in options. But their buying power has gone up, and that’s a real shift. For sellers, that means demand is still there, but pricing correctly matters. Well-positioned homes are still selling. Overpriced homes are sitting.

The broader economy is confusing, but real estate isn’t. This is the part that trips a lot of people up. Consumer confidence is low. Energy prices have been climbing. Global conflicts are creating uncertainty in ways that feel unpredictable. And yet the stock market keeps hitting new highs. The signals seem contradictory, and that makes people hesitant.

But through all of that noise, real estate has remained remarkably steady. Homes are still selling, prices are holding, and the fundamentals that drive housing, people needing places to live, and not enough homes to go around, haven’t changed.

Those are the national numbers, and they paint a pretty clear picture. But national data only tells you so much. The market in your neighborhood, in your price range, and for your specific situation can look very different from the headlines.

If you want to know what the real numbers look like where you are, I’m happy to walk you through it so you’re making decisions based on what’s actually happening, not what someone said on the news. Call or text me at 1-518-861-7016, email me at Kevin@ClancyRealEstate.com, or visit albanynyrealestateblog.com.