Welcome to PSA Thursday. This is a weekly segment in which we cover information, context, and tips that can help you make sense of these

Pandemic times. What does this mean for your wallet for your investments?

How do you manage your money in the middle of a crisis?

These are the questions that we focus on in these PSA Thursday episodes. My name is Paula Pant.

This is the Affordable Care Podcast.

And today we will discuss how the pandemic is affecting the real estate market.

Here's what we're going to cover in today's episode. We're going to talk about where the market was before the pandemic struck.

Where is it now? And where might it be going in the next six to 12 months?

And although I'm broadly using the phrase real estate market, we are specifically going to focus on the residential market in the US.

Real estate as many of you know can be residential or commercial, but in this episode we're going to focus on the residential housing market.

All of the research and the data that I am about to cite is conducted by an attributed to NEMA Wedlake, who is a principal at Thomas Ventures, in a report called the US Housing Market Health Check.

We will link to this report in the show notes and the show notes will be available at affordanything.com slash PSA Thursday.

So where was the US residential housing market before the pandemic? What kind of situation did we start in?

Well, home prices had been rising steadily since the greater session.

The price of homes have reached a historic new high. They've beaten where they were at their prior 2007 peak.

So previously right before the greater session, the peak of the housing market, the price peak was in March 2007.

Home prices of course crashed during their greater session. They've been slowly rising ever since. And now using data that was collected right before the pandemic struck.

Home prices are valued at 115% of their prior peak levels.

So they have formed a historic new high. And from 2012 through the beginning of 2020, home prices grew by 5.8% annually.

Now why did home prices climb so much? Well, there were several factors. Number one was low mortgage rates.

We've had low mortgage rates for the past decade and there's no sign of that letting up anytime soon.

Number two is a decline in new home construction, which limits the housing supply.

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