You gotta judge the market in that area. I saw people buy at the wrong time, during a bubble.

An interesting perspective I heard about is “affordability”. To describe that with my own words: if your income is stable or will grow compared to your housing costs, and housing costs are not burdensome to you, housing is affordable to you. Owning a house rather than having a lease should make your housing costs vary less, so if housing costs will go up in the future it might be useful to buy a house (but if housing costs will go down in the future it might not be useful to buy a house). I found some graphs for “Affordability”: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-affordability/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FIXHAI

I have also heard that it’s hard to find people to do repair work in some places, and that people there charge a lot of money for their services. If you have trouble finding someone who you can pay just to produce a quote for a roof repair, the actual cost of housing will probably be higher than in other places.

I had a thought after looking at this post: I expect that it’s better to own land in places that are more likely for people to want to move to or work near.

Maybe, but in another, more civilized country than the US.

I’m in the process of buying a new house.

I think “good time” is just kind of luck. I’m buying now because circumstances make it the best choice. Interest rates are kind of high (mine is 7%) and if that drops a few, I’ll refinance to get a better rate.

I looked for houses that had a space easily convertible to a MIL suite cut off from the rest of the house. My plan is to get the house payment down as quick as possible with a renter in the MIL suite.

Great advice in the other comments, so I’ll only add this - with this being your first house, if you can afford it, do a multifamily unit or a property that can be used as multifamily. Nearly everywhere is in a housing shortage, so you’ll be able to get a good win win with some renters that can help pay your mortgage faster while they have an affordable place to live. Best if the units can be fully separated so less drama.

Trying to work out house price trends is like trying to catch a falling knife. My advice would always be that you should just buy when you have the deposit and know you can make the mortgage payments.

I went with buying raw land out of the city, for me it’s a 30 minute drive and no traffic, my “rent” is under $200 for the year of property taxes. I own the land for less than 1 year of rent.

I can live in an RV, and I can build a house or convert a shed to live in so it’s super affordable, plus I have room for a garden to feed my family.

I’m neutral on the housing market right now. People buying houses are generally living in them (or renting them), there’s very little house flipping like in 2005-06. There’s also no interest-only mortgages, so people actually have the cash flow to stay. Rates are probably not going up, but they might come down a little. If they do drop, I think prices will go up proportionately such that the monthly payment is the same either way. New housing is being built, but not fast enough to make a major impact on demand in the near term.

Altogether, I think housing in the US is “fairly” valued on a supply/demand basis at the moment. If we get a recession, prices might dip, but I would be very surprised to see another crash like 2007-09. However, I also don’t expect to see prices go up quickly from here other than in response to lower interest rates. So, if I were making a new purchase decision today, I’d be thinking about the following:

• Do I plan to stay 5+ years (the longer, the better)
• Can I comfortably afford to pay the mortgage (or is it at least comparable to rent)?
• Can I afford a major repair bill? Especially if any of the big ticket items will hit their typical end of life in the next 5 years.

Here are some of my major home maintenance expenses from the last 10 years:

• Water supply line to the house failed (polybutylene): $2.5k
• Tankless hot water unit failed: $3.5k
• Wildlife exclusion due to rats in the attic and crawlspace: $2k
• Electrical repairs due to rats in the crawlspace chewing on wiring: $3.4k
• Totally gut and rebuild kitchen & bathroom due to plumbing failure: $2k deductible, plus my homeowner’s insurance increased every year since
• Replaced failed mini-split HVAC system: $3.5k
• Dig up and repair sewage line that was clogged with roots: $3.5k
• New sod to repair the lawn after the plumbers dug it up: $1.5k

Those are the big items I recall that I had little choice in. I also replaced my way past end of life 2 zone HVAC system for about $30k. I could have kept the old one running longer and I could have gotten a cheaper replacement (maybe $22k), but the old system was struggling and couldn’t keep the house comfortable anymore. I seem to recall hearing a good rule of thumb is to set aside 1-2% of your home’s value every year for major maintenance and that seems about right from my experience.

Since 2008 the best time to buy has been when you have the money and find something appropriate. It’s no different now. Millennials have been hoping for a housing crash they could take advantage of for 16 years and it hasn’t materialized. Prices just keep going up and historical evidence suggests that will continue until another crash at an indeterminate point in the future. Trying to time that point is only going to leave you as a permanent renter.

I really doubt the guy who loves low interest rates, looks to be trying to devalue the dollar purposefully, and is a corporate landlord himself will make a lot of moves that purposefully deflate the price of housing. He may do it accidentally, but I kind of doubt that too. If Trump gets his way and deports a bunch of people, welp…guess what a lot of the construction labor pool is? A mortgage is essentially a long-term bet that the dollar will be worth less than it is today. If you can afford to get one at current mortgage rates, I would pull the trigger. If rates drop again you can refinance, but what you will never be able to do is get a 2025 offer accepted on a house that’s now worth much more in 2030. My main regret in buying my place–in the pants-shitting part of the early pandemic–was not doing it earlier.

Just look into what you can afford and what kind of loan you can get and see if it makes sense. I don’t think there’s going to be a crash because there is still a huge deficit of new building. I expect that there will be more housing built this year, but there’s still a high demand, so those new houses will be pricey. In the long term I expect more inventory to open up as the age group dying out is the largest age group. However, that inventory will be places that are less desirable to younger people. The population of small towns is about to shrink drastically.

Not answering your question. But if you do buy, don’t listen to the realtor or loan officer about how big a loan you can afford. Both are incentivized to sell you the biggest house/loan. Neither will care when you’re struggling to pay for it.

You’re monthly payment plus insurance plus taxes should be something you could safely pay for six months while unemployed. If that’s impossible, get a small house. The worst possible situation is being house poor.

The best time to buy is when you need to, it’s hard to time the market and if you are going to stay there for a long time all that matters is can you afford it. Where I live they sure seem overvalued, but when we bought our house I was sure it was overpriced and the theoretical value now is 2x that amount not even 5 years later, WTF? So my guess is we will see a downturn, especially with the new government, but really the best time to buy doesn’t always align with the best price.

Remember that maintenance on a house is expensive too, build that into your affordability calculation.

idk, house prices are rising, you may want to either buy as soon as you can or wait for the bubble to pop

I made the decision to buy at a bad time, and it turns out the mortgage rates went much higher than what I bought at. I have no idea if that will happen again, but my mental health absolutely benefited from owning my house over the stress of renting and waiting to find out if I need to move every year again.