Homes. If you think they’re expensive to buy, just wait until you find out how much they cost to own and maintain.

Sorry, that’s another >$10,000 bathroom renovation talking. Believe me when I say that new or old, well-built or otherwise, something always (always) needs improving or fixing in your home, whether you know it or not. And exactly nothing to do with those improvements and fixes is going to be cheap.

I remember a mortgage broker friend (sorry, acquaintance — I have no friends) once recalled to me all the times she’d seen first-time homeowners crying tears of joy on signing day. “If you’re that happy to get in the door, the math must’ve been a close call,” I replied, on the way to grimly quipping that those people would be “plain old crying” six months later when they ran through what they mistook for a cash “cushion” on the first three repairs.

I’ve said it a hundred times if I’ve said it once: If you buy a home that isn’t a pure custom build where the GC’s on site, all the time, and cares as much about your home as he (or she) does his (or her) own — which is basically to say if you spend anything less than $5 million — you better have $100,000 in cash ready to deploy on miscellaneous “stuff.” I promise you’re going to need it.

Anyway, price appreciation on the marquee gauge of national home values slowed again in May, according to Tuesday’s Case-Shiller update. Remember: This series comes on a two-month delay.

As the figure shows, the 20-city index rose just 2.8% YoY, the slowest annual rate since August of 2023 and slightly short of the 2.91% consensus. The broader, national gauge posted a 2.3% YoY increase, and the narrower, 10-city index returned 3.4%, down from 4.1% YoY the prior month.

On an unadjusted basis, all three indexes rose in May from April, but after controlling for seasonality, they posted MoM declines of 0.3%.

Tuesday’s figures “continued the year’s slow unwind of price momentum,” S&P Dow Jones’s Nicholas Godec said, in color accompanying the release. “The spring market lifted prices modestly, but not enough to suggest sustained acceleration.”

There it is again: A reference to a very disappointing spring home-buying season. I’ve called it a “bust.” And I think substantially all the data — both sales and price figures — support that characterization. “Monthly trends signaled broad-based fatigue,” Godec went on, adding that “seasonal momentum is proving weaker than usual, and the slowdown is now more than just a story of higher mortgage rates.”

That latter bit’s key. Yes, elevated financing costs (or elevated by “modern” standards anyway) are an impediment, and probably the most important impediment. But the US housing market’s in a state of “total gridlock,” as I’ve repeatedly described it, and that situation isn’t amenable to monocausal analysis.

In a piece published Tuesday, Redfin’s Mark Worley called starter homes — sales of which rose nearly 4% last month — a “bright spot in a sluggish housing market.” Sales in all other price tiers fell in June. But there’s some critical nuance.

As Redfin Senior Economist Sheharyar Bokhari explained, not everyone buying a starter home’s actually a traditional starter home buyer. “With prices rising and mortgage rates elevated, some first-time buyers may be pushed out of the market by move-up buyers who aren’t able to afford the next tier themselves,” Bokhari remarked.

That’s pretty funny (read: sad). You can’t buy a starter home because someone who bought a starter home a decade ago is now priced out of a move-up.

The average starter home price is now more than a quarter of a million nationally, up 63% or so from 2019. That’s atop a near doubling of starter home prices in the lead up to the pandemic. The figure above gives you some context.

But listen, if you’re renting or living with family because you can’t afford to buy even the lowest-priced homes in your neck of the woods, be comforted that it could be far worse. As Worley pointed out, the median price of a starter home in San Francisco is $1 million.

I don’t know about anyone else, but sometimes I wonder if America’s homelessness epidemic might have more to do with prices than with drug addiction and mental illness. But then again, I was once a crazy alcoholic. So I guess that’s something I’d say.