American Home Valuation Hits $35 Trillion, As Housing Market Slows
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US existing home sales reached a 16-year low last month. Existing home sales dropped 8.8% to an annual run rate of 3.75 million. Median home prices were nearly flat at about $417,000. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun commented, “Home buying is difficult when mortgage rates have climbed to their highest levels since 2000, aside from a single month in 2023.”
The NAR also argued that sales are slow because many people have enough home equity that they don’t have to sell. They estimate this at 88 million homeowners. Homes for sale also don’t sit on the market for long. The median time a home spends on the market is 34 days.
The effects of mortgage rates can’t be understated. A 30-year fixed mortgage carries an interest rate of about 7.3% today. In January 2021, the comparable figure was 2.65%
No one knows how much of the $35 trillion is locked up for people who want to sell their homes. “The average mortgaged homeowner held $310,000 in equity in the second quarter of 2026, according to CoreLogic. Total equity held by mortgage borrowers nationwide was $17.9 trillion, with total housing wealth across every homeowner, mortgaged or not, reaching $34.9 trillion.”
Locked-up money is a problem for people who need that equity for other reasons, from retirement to paying off high-interest debt. The challenge is that someone who sells a home with a 3% mortgage will pay over 7% if they buy another one. It is ugly math.
The housing market won’t unlock for some time. That means trillions of dollars that could become liquid won’t. And that is money that could stimulate the economy.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
