"It's The Worst Demand Market EVER" For Housing | Nick Gerli, Reventure Consulting ​

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**Nick Gerli** (0:28)
Google searches for homes for sale are at their lowest level ever. Mortgage applications are 40% below where they were in 2019, 2020
It's the worst demand market ever. And not enough people in real estate fully understand this. And more sellers really need to understand this. There is going to be no saving grace. There is going to be no, oh, Kevin Warsh comes in as a Fed share and he cuts interest rates. It's not going to matter. It's not going to matter. The only thing that's going to matter is more inventory and lower prices.

**Adam Taggart** (1:15)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money, I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for a special report on the housing market here in 2026 with my good friend Nick Gerli, who's been on this channel many times, keeping us updated on where things are headed. Nick, thanks so much for joining us. You put together a whole bunch of great charts for us, and you have found an article right before we went to air here, basically showing that realtors are declaring a new housing crisis as home sales drop by 8%. So, my friend, thanks so much for joining us today. Looks like we got a hell of a lot to talk about.

**Nick Gerli** (1:54)
Great to be here with you, Adam, talking about the 2026 housing market. And yeah, it's off to a rough start. The sales in January 2026 were close to the worst ever. Down 42% from their pandemic peak, down more than 25% from the long-term average, down 8% from December 2025, down 4% year-over-year. And yeah, the realtors are saying we have a new housing crisis because the demand's not coming back. The demand continues to crash.

**Adam Taggart** (2:24)
Okay, the demand continues to crash. So we've been seeing the softening of the housing market now for a good while. I think most viewers here are probably quite familiar with the fact that unaffordability is the theme of the US housing market.
Many people have called it frozen. Basically, houses have got to a level of unaffordability that the vast majority of buyers really can't afford them. So the people who can transact are mostly the already wealthy. So the houses that are transacting are kind of your higher level homes, which is kind of keeping the average home price from crashing the way that sales have so far. But we got a lot to go through here, Nick. But I'm just at a very high level here.
Do you expect home prices to start accelerating to the downside the way that supply and demand has?

**Nick Gerli** (3:20)
Yeah, I think we do here at Reventure, Adam. I mean, we have downward forecasts for about half of the US housing market in 2026 based on current data, based on the current data and inventory and days on market. That's not really yet factoring in this recent sales report. And if this demand continues to trend negatively, like we expect it to over the next couple of months, I think we're going to probably have to revise down our forecasts in quite a few different states and cities. And the thing to understand is that actually we have already been seeing big price declines in certain markets. This isn't just a demand crash. We are seeing prices drop in places like Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona, Tampa, Florida. Many of these markets are now down double digits or more from their peak in 2022 So one by one, the dominoes keep falling, demand is crashed, certain big sunbelt boom towns are going down. We're even seeing builders now do some of their biggest price cuts since 2008 And so, yeah, you know, our forecast is probably going to be trending to the downside as the year goes on.

**Adam Taggart** (4:26)
Okay, so we've talked over the past year about some of these sunbelt boom towns that had pretty big price corrections. You just named a whole bunch of them. Have any of those falling knives hit the floor yet in any markets, in your opinion, or are all those markets still heading downwards?

**Nick Gerli** (4:44)
Yeah, that's a great question. Probably the closest is Austin, Texas. So in Austin, values are down close to 25% over the last three and a half years. That's a full scale crash. That's much bigger than what Austin's downturn was in 2008 It only went down 5% in 2008 It's now down 25%. Since 2022, we have continued downward forecast for Austin because there's so much inventory on the market. However, on the other hand, we are starting to see that the market will soon become undervalued if these declines continue over the next six months. So I think probably by the middle to the end of 2026, Reventure might have some buy signals in markets like Austin, potentially some markets in Florida where the values have really gone down a lot already.