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Real Estate housing experts doubt pre-pandemic prices will ever come back to America

January 15, 2026 | | Print Article

Economic experts have serious doubts that the prices for goods and services will ever be as affordable as they were in 2019 and earlier.

Part of the reason why is that they don’t believe prices are moving up and down cyclically, but forever up structurally.

“While it might appear that things were more affordable in 2019, this kind of march toward lack of affordability has been going on for a long time,” principal Dan Coakley of PMG Affordable told Fox Business Network. “And it’s gonna take a long time to make a dent in it.”

“I don’t think that affordability is going to go all the way back to a point where people feel like it’s manageable,” he added.

Indeed, according to a recent Realtor.com report cited by Fox News, mortgage rates would need to fall to 2.65 percent, median household income would need to rise by 56 percent, and home prices would need to drop by 35 percent for the housing market to feel affordable again.

“Just how radical those moves would be with respect to interest rates or home price depreciation or income increases, it just shows you how much work we have to do,” Coakley noted.

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“I have to compliment the Trump administration now for really putting this into bright focus, because I think it’s going to be really necessary, and moving all of those levers as much as we can is going to be super, super important,” he added.

According to the Realtor.com report, it’ll take mortgage rates staying around six percent and wages/prices growing at last year’s rate to finally reach 2019 and earlier prices by, say, 2047 at the earliest.

Coakley, for his part, strongly doubts that the interest rate will drop below three percent anytime soon. He also noted that median incomes haven’t kept up with rent and home prices.

“People at the lower income levels or middle income levels, even upper-middle income levels, have not been able to access and participate in that asset level appreciation that’s been so fundamental to the American dream and what’s driven people’s net worth,” he explained.

“Increasing supply is probably one of the most important things we can do, and that the administration can kind of foster to help in this crisis. Similar type moves — incentives, [subsidies] to incentivize a developer to build affordable for-sale product – would be very welcome in the sector,” he added.

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But Coakley also warned that fixing just one thing — such as the interest rate — won’t fix everything.

“You play with one lever, and you bring interest rates down too much, that’s probably an indicator that the economy is not healthy, and incomes aren’t going to keep up with the inflation that that might cause,” noted.

That said, Coakley is optimistic about President Donald Trump’s recent decision to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds and to propose limits on large institutional investors buying single-family homes.

“Politicians on both sides of the aisle should be able to support [this],” he argued. “I think those are the kind of big structural moves that, actually, combined with other things, can actually move the needle… It just can be encouraging to people psychologically that they have an administration that understands what is fair and what is not fair.”

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The worst thing politicians can do, he continued, is normalize “this level of affordability.”

“Psychologically, it’s not good for family creation. It’s not good for job creation. It’s not good for our cities, for our communities,” he noted. “You can chip away at it on interest rate policy, but really, we need to come back to the table with ways to bring the cost down to bill-for-sale housing.”

“I think starting to think about ways to develop new programs that facilitate similar affordable housing, but that can be for sale, and where people can feel like they’re participating in the upside of their most important or maybe largest asset, I think will be critical in thinking through the strategy,” Coakley concluded.

All this comes amid the housing market turning a corner late last year when “the share of homeowners carrying mortgages above 6 percent surpass[ed] those with rates below 3 percent,” according to Realtor.com.

Vivek Saxena
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