What 11 Years in Real Estate Has Taught Me About the Housing Market

When I started in 2015, we were still cleaning up the mess left by the financial crisis. Home values had recovered enough that many people could finally sell, but sometimes just barely. I saw plenty of sellers bring money to closing. Sometimes it was a few hundred dollars. Sometimes it was thousands. Selling a house did not automatically mean walking away with a big equity check.

I understood that personally because we were underwater on our own house for years. We bought in 2004 and then watched its value drop during the financial crisis. We weren't planning to move, so we stayed put and kept paying the mortgage. Eventually the market recovered, but for years, selling would have meant dealing with a very different financial reality than the one we'd expected when we bought it.

Over the next few years, things gradually improved for sellers. Values increased and inventory tightened. Houses could still sit on the market, inspections and repairs were normal parts of a transaction, and buyers and sellers actually negotiated. You might get multiple offers, but sometimes "multiple offers" meant two buyers negotiating against each other, not 20 offers arriving in a weekend.

Then came 2020 and 2021. Inventory became incredibly tight, mortgage rates dropped to historic lows, and buyers competed in ways I'd never seen before. Prices shot up. Buyers offered over asking price, covered appraisal gaps and sometimes waived protections just to get the house. Some of those buyers paid a COVID-era premium for their homes, but many of them also financed those homes with mortgage rates around 3%. There were two sides to that equation.

Then the pendulum swung again. Inflation rose, the Fed raised interest rates, mortgage rates climbed, and affordability changed dramatically. Buyers pulled back. Sellers who had locked in those incredibly low rates didn't want to move. For a while, everybody seemed stuck.

Now we're adjusting again. Buyers have more choices and more negotiating power. We're seeing seller-paid closing costs again. We're negotiating repairs again. A house can sit on the market without there necessarily being something wrong with it. And yes, in some areas and price points, some of that rapid COVID-era appreciation is being given back.

I have a front-row seat to a small piece of what's happening because I see the contracts coming across our desks at Right Hand Real Estate Services. Most of the agents we work with aren't close to hitting the goals they set for themselves for 2026. But some are. And people are absolutely still buying and selling homes.

Last week, 14 of our agents put $7,252,000 under contract. This week, 10 agents put another $4,725,000 under contract. That's almost $12 million put under contract by 24 agents in two weeks.

A slower, more difficult market doesn't mean nobody is buying houses. It means the market is different, and the people who need or want to move are doing it under today's conditions instead of yesterday's.

That's hard if you're the person who bought near the top and needs to sell now. But it's also part of something I've watched over and over again: real estate is cyclical. Sometimes you benefit from increasing values. Sometimes you benefit from unusually low interest rates. Sometimes the market moves in your favor after you buy, and sometimes it moves against you for a while.

I've experienced all of that personally, too. I bought my first house in 1998 and sold it in 2002. I bought again in 2004 and owned that house through the financial crisis. I sold in 2020, bought again in 2021 and benefited from an extraordinarily low mortgage rate. We're staying put for now.

But if life changed and I needed to sell tomorrow, I'd have to make a decision based on the market that exists tomorrow. I couldn't sell my house in the 2021 market just because I liked that market better. I also wouldn't make a major life decision solely because I didn't want to "lose" some of the value my house once had on paper.

I think that's the perspective that gets lost when we talk about whether it's a "good time" or a "bad time" to buy or sell a house. There isn't one housing market that stays put long enough for all of us to perfectly time it.

We buy and sell homes while we're also getting married, having children, changing jobs, retiring, getting divorced, caring for parents, moving closer to family, needing more space, needing less space and simply living our lives.

The market matters. The numbers absolutely matter. But they're only part of the decision.

Life keeps happening while the real estate market cycles.