Housing market is slumping in a booming economy: Why?

to incomes. Moreover, lending standards have remained more rigorous than they were during the past housing boom, so it has been harder for people to stretch to buy a home. The inability of people to buy homes they can’t really afford is great news in terms of avoiding another crisis, but not so great for the near-term outlook for housing.

“Buyers can only stomach so many price increases until it gets unsustainable,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online brokerage Redfin. “Prices reached a breaking point where buyers were fed up and started to consider other options,” she said, including renting and moving away from the expensive coastal markets where prices are most out of whack with incomes.

As Economics 101 teaches, price movements are the way that supply and demand match up with each other. But in the housing sector especially, that adjustment can take a while.

In contrast with the stock market, where relatively unemotional traders are buying and selling shares every day and the market stays liquid, home purchase and sales decisions can take months and are deeply emotional for the participants.

What seems to be happening is that sellers are trying to cling to the spring 2018 prices that their neighbors received, while there aren’t enough buyers in late 2018 willing or able to pay those prices.

In a Fannie Mae survey of home purchase sentiment, the proportion of people who think it is a good time to buy a home has decreased significantly since spring, to a net 21 percent from 29 percent. But so has the proportion who think it is a good time to sell, which has dropped to 35 percent from 45 percent.

You would expect, in a zerosum transaction like a home sale, for those numbers to move in opposite directions. Instead, it seems that sellers are unhappily realizing they aren’t going to get what they thought their house was worth six months ago, and buyers still think homes are too expensive.

That helps explain why transaction volume, especially for new houses, has fallen substantially while prices haven’t (at least yet). It’s a standoff. And the outcome of the standoff will, in the aggregate, play a role in shaping the future of the economy.

There is precedent for this, and it isn’t a happy one. In the last housing boom, new home sales peaked in July 2005, and home prices didn’t start declining until May 2006. It didn’t start to hurt the overall economy until December 2007, when the damage had spread through an overleveraged global financial system.

But that doesn’t mean this episode has to end in tears. Home prices are not nearly as out of line with incomes as they were then; speculative activity hasn’t been nearly as frothy; and consumer debt levels are considerably more measured.

“I think income growth will help us get out of this period,” said Robert Dietz, the chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “We’re probably looking at a period where existing home sales volume is flat to declining, and it now looks like 2017 was the peak year for transaction volume.”

A strong (nonhousing) economy makes it more likely that this housing slump will end without a steep 2008-style downturn. So does the basic reality that young adults are forming families and need a place to house them.

But in the meantime, it could be a soft few months or even years of standoffs between buyers and sellers, with the big question of which comes first: sellers who settle for less after recognizing that the price they thought they would get is beyond the reach of buyers, or incomes that catch up with a housing market that got a little ahead of itself.