By Shaina Mishkin
It has been a tough few years for home buyers, but there's a glimmer of hope for 2026. Two new forecasts say home prices will rise modestly next year: Redfin expects a 1% price increase nationally, while Realtor.com sees a 2.2% gain. Both anticipate prices growing slower than wages, and mortgage rates averaging 6.3%. Redfin predicts a 3% lift in sales, while Realtor.com estimates 1.7%. ( Barron's parent News Corp runs Realtor.com.)
But location, of course, is everything. Prices in September continued to rise in Northeastern and Midwestern metros tracked by S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and slid in Sunbelt metros like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami. It's what S&P Dow Jones Indices' Nicholas Godec calls a "tale of two markets."
Realtor.com forecasts that 2026 prices will fall below year-ago levels in 22 of 100 metro areas. Two Florida locales, Cape Coral and North Port, lead in anticipated declines, with 10.2% and 8.9% price drops, respectively. In October, active listings in both metros were 13.3% higher than 2024, which probably fuels expectation of softer prices.
Elsewhere, prices will climb. Metros with the largest anticipated gains include some of the most affordable housing markets: Toledo, Ohio (13.1%); Syracuse, N.Y. (12.4%); and Scranton, Pa. (10.9%). October listing prices in all three areas were below $300,000, according to Realtor.com -- well under the national $424,200 median.
Write to Shaina Mishkin at shaina.mishkin@dowjones.com
Last Week
Markets
Bitcoin continued to swoon, falling 6% on Monday, leading global stocks and bonds down. U.S. stocks fell, with the Dow industrials down nearly a point, then rallied amid volatility on hopes for a Federal Reserve rate cut. ADP said the economy lost 32,000 jobs in November, and late-November jobless claims fell to a three-year low. On the week, the Dow rose 0.5%, the S&P 500 0.3%, and the Nasdaq Composite 0.9%.
Companies
Walt Disney's Zootopia 2 took in $156 million in the U.S. and Canada, $400 million internationally. Regulators ordered fixes to a software glitch on some 6,000 Airbus A320s, and the company cut its 2025 delivery target. With its shares down 60% in the Bitcoin selloff, Strategy established a $1.44 billion U.S.-dollar reserve to pay preferred stock dividends and interest payments. Blackstone, Apollo Global, and KKR will participate in a Bank of England private-market stress test. Apple replaced its AI chief, John Giannandrea, with Microsoft's Amar Subramanya. The European Union opened an antitrust probe into Meta Platforms embedding AI tools in WhatsApp. The White House moved to scrap Biden-era car fuel-efficiency standards.
Deals
Netflix said it would acquire Warner Bros. Discovery's movie and TV studio and HBO MAX streaming businesses for $83 billion, including debt, beating out Paramount Skydance and Comcast...Chip maker Marvell Technology agreed to buy Celestial AI for $3.25 billion.
Next Week
Tuesday 12/9
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for both September and October. At the end of August, there were 7.22 million job openings, and 1.02 unemployed people for every open position, the highest ratio since April 2021.
Wednesday 12/10
Adobe and Oracle report quarterly results on Wednesday, followed by Broadcom and Costco Wholesale on Thursday.
The Federal Open Market Committee announces its monetary-policy decision. The FOMC is widely expected to cut the federal-funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.5%-3.75%. The central bank also releases its quarterly Summary of Economic Projections. In the September SEP, the median projection for the federal-funds rate by year-end 2026 was 3.4%, which would imply only one more quarter-point cut, assuming that the FOMC cuts as expected at this meeting. Traders are pricing in a roughly 3% federal-funds rate by December 2026, a much more aggressive easing cycle than currently forecast by the central bank. This may be due to the dovish Kevin Hassett, currently director of the National Economic Council and the favorite to replace Jerome Powell, whose term as Fed chair ends in May.
The Numbers
4.1%
Increase in Black Friday retail sales from 2024, excluding autos, up from 2024's 3.4%, Mastercard estimated.
64%
Percentage of venture funding, roughly $161 billion, going into AI over the first nine months of 2025.
4 M
International Energy Agency's estimate of excess per-day supply of barrels of oil in 2026, a record.
$16 T
The combined wealth of the world's billionaires, up 13% since last year, from a UBS report.
Write to Robert Teitelman at bob.teitelman@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 05, 2025 19:21 ET (00:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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