It's great to have you here on The Clark Howard Show.

You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make

better financial decisions in your life.

And in today's episode, we've been talking about housing, but I want to specifically talk about the condo

market and what makes it different year after year from the traditional single family home market.

And later, there's a fee popping up when you go to see the doctor, and it is bad, big, and ugly for your wallet,

and your insurer may say, jokes on you, we're not paying.

You've got to know what to look out for, and I want to protect you from damage to your wallet later in this podcast.

Right now I want to talk about the housing market in general, but then zero in on the condo market.

So the housing market is stalled out, and prices have actually fallen in more than one third of the major housing markets in the country from a year ago.

And so we had a big, big, big, big run up in prices over a five-year period.

And now there's indigestion.

And sellers are looking for the prices that things had escalated to through 24.

And now here we are at the tail end of summer in 25, and those prices have stalled.

And buyers are in a buyer's strike, still facing high mortgage rates,

and sellers are like, what do I do? Well, let me tell you, what's going on in the single

family home market is nothing compared to what's going on the condo market.

The condo market, as I first realized back about, gosh, 35 years ago,

the condo market patterns are more extreme than housing market.

So housing markets, it's very rare what's happened with the housing market in recent years where it ratcheted up so much year by year. Usually the cost of housing goes up

by the rate of inflation plus a little bit more. And the condo market does something completely different.

The condo market over time, when you look at long periods of time, trends exactly the same

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