A recent Gallup poll found that A majority of U.S. adults (64%) continue to believe home prices in their local area will increase over the next year, reports MarketWatch editor Quentin Fottrell. That's the highest percentage since before the housing market crash.
The level of optimism is edging closer to the 70% of adults in 2005 who said prices would continue rising. That, of course, was less than one year before the peak of the housing market bubble in early 2006, which was largely fueled by a wave of subprime lending. (Roughly one-quarter of respondents in both 2005 and 2018 said they believed house prices would remain the same.)
In 2009, during the depths of the Great Recession, only 22% of Americans believed house prices would rise. But optimism about the housing market has made a slow recovery—along with the market itself—in the intervening years. Today, only 10% in the Gallup survey believe prices will fall. That compares to 5% who felt similarly pessimistic in 2005, just two years before the crash.
The property market has gained steam in the last 12 months. The national median list price now rests at $273,663, roughly 20% higher than in both March 2015 and March 2005. Between 2015 and 2016 the national median listing price only rose 4.8%, but rose by 7.4% over the last year. And yet some housing analysts are less optimistic than many people surveyed by Gallup.
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