SANTA ANA, Calif., Oct 7 — Today, Veros Real Estate Solutions (Veros®), an industry leader in enterprise risk management and collateral valuation services, released its Q3 2026 VeroFORECAST℠, projecting that U.S. home prices will rise just 1% over the next 12 months. VeroFORECAST evaluates home prices in over three hundred of the nation’s largest housing markets, and Veros is committed to the data science of predicting home value based on rigorous analysis of the fundamentals and interrelationships of numerous economic, housing, and geographic variables pertaining to home value.
The remarkable thing about America’s housing market is not that prices are barely rising. It is that they are rising at all.
Mortgage rates have crossed 7% again. Home sales remain historically weak. Buyers are resisting today’s combination of prices and financing costs; sellers are resisting price reductions that would bring substantially more buyers back. The disagreement is being settled another way: fewer homes change hands.
Affordability has also become much bigger than the mortgage payment. Property taxes, insurance premiums, HOA fees and maintenance costs all add to the price of owning a home. Meanwhile, more existing homes are available for sale than a year ago, giving buyers greater choice and bargaining power. Weak sales, more inventory and strained affordability would ordinarily make falling prices seem likely. Yet national forecasts continue to call for modest appreciation.
There is an important limitation in what housing data can tell us about this market. Home price indices measure properties that sell. The homeowner who rejects an offer and withdraws a listing leaves no transaction behind. And a seller concession can lower what a buyer effectively pays without producing an equivalent reduction in the recorded sale price. Some of the housing market dynamics are therefore playing out through transactions that never happen.
Then there is the problem with talking about “the U.S. housing market” as though it were a single market.
Supply, affordability, employment, migration and demographics differ sharply across the country. The divide runs even deeper than geography. Within the same metro, different price segments can move in different directions. In many markets, higher-priced and luxury homes have been more resilient than entry-level properties. Affluent buyers tend to be less sensitive to mortgage rates, are more likely to make large down payments or pay cash and can draw on accumulated housing and financial wealth.
The latest VeroFORECAST℠ makes those divisions particularly visible.
The markets with the most price upside are concentrated largely in the Northeast and Midwest, led by Rockford, IL, with projected appreciation of 4.7%. Norwich, Hartford, Racine, Erie, Binghamton, Lancaster, Milwaukee, South Bend and Reading round out the ten markets at the top of the forecast, with expected gains ranging from 3.5% to 4.7%.
