Wow, had a friend bring this to my attention, he had someone at his work looking for a house, my friend mentioned the area where we use to live and even gave him our old address as a reference even though it is not for sale. My friend pointed out that our house was the second most expensive house on our old street of guessing 40+ homes and it is a one-story among two-story homes, ours was a 1900 sq ft the largest I think is 2600 which happened to be next to us and sold $7 less than ours about 9 months later. Why was ours more, guessing our pool, less than 10% have pools.
So why am I sharing this, Housing Market BS news...I went back to see what he was talking about. Since we sold almost 2 years ago, Aug. 2024, there has not been any drop or crash in the market as we have all heard from Fake News and so called Experts. Our house as all the houses in our old subdivision actually increased in value from two years ago. Now not by much, I checked all our neighbors houses, people we knew, houses that we were competing with when we sold, houses that we had our eyes one from when we bought back in 2012, so about a dozen and a half houses.
What I found is they all increased, again not my much, but $5-10k or more, none went down in value. So I did not stop there, I checked our daughters house who sold Jan. 2025, theirs went up $50k but is was a 4k sq ft house but in the same area of town. Next checked my wife's sister's house which they sold 2 years before ours, they have a pool, bigger yard but 5 year older home than ours but more property and in the Katy area, another HUGE area by Houston, their house also went up from when we sold ours, by $15k. So I did not stop their, checked two other family houses back closer to our old area, both also increased. We know this because we have all shared this kind of info and all the houses we have all bought for a few decades.
What is my point, I call BS...in looking at our old neighborhood today it is like a time warp, house prices are the same, slightly higher even than when we went through our sale in 2024. Definitely no decrease. I know this is peak selling season, right before summer, more listing, higher listing prices but again it is a mirror image of when we put our house up for sale two years ago. No 2008 crisis which recovered fairly quickly and prices continued to rise afterwards, again we were watching the market back then hoping to buy a second home at the low rates but was unable to at that time financially. Will there be another 2008, of course, but so far all those who have said so these last few years are eating crow.
I will end with this, I have already shared our granddaughter bought a house in Katy, 200 sq ft smaller than our old house, no pool yet paid more than what we sold our house for, it is her first house, she is now in her mid twenties so we did not rock the boat but praised her for her new home. Her job she has had for 4 years, avg. salary, under $100k a year, thinking maybe 80 now. Was approved for the mortgage. Yes it is sad houses are Way over priced, still, and no the 3% rates are in the past, think she got right under 6% but young people are still buying houses. Maybe the ones with a shotty job history or bad credit rating are not but that has always been the case. We are glad she broke from that stupid generation of hers that are not getting married and don't want to own a home. She is one of the smart ones...