If you’re a struggling renter locked out of the American dream, you can take some measure of solace in the fact that US homeowners’ housing wealth declined three straight months in real terms over the spring and early summer.

Tuesday’s update on the marquee gauges of national home prices found the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller National Index notching a mere 1.7% YoY gain for July (remember: these series are reported on a two-month delay). That annual gain undershot headline inflation by a full percentage point.

As the figure below shows, the scope of these undershoots is widening. It was negligible in May, which is to say home price growth and headline inflation were more or less the same. It was 75bps in June. For July, it was 102bps.

Last month, the color accompanying the Case-Shiller release called this a “decisive shift.” That’s not inaccurate, but like everything else in the macro universe — and the universe more generally — it’s relative and comes with a lot of important caveats.

Homeowners tend to be in a better financial position than renters, and the inflation profile for the well-off differs markedly from the less fortunate. The rich tend to spend far less of their income on things like food and energy. It’s not that they pay less for those items than the poor. It’s that they pay out less of their total earnings as a share to purchase necessities for which prices tend to be volatile.

In addition, homeowners’ monthly housing payments are almost always fixed, and that’s assuming they have a payment at all. In stylized terms — i.e., forgetting about insurance, the rising cost of upgrades and repairs and so on — shelter inflation’s not especially relevant. Certainly not compared to renters, although it’s worth noting that at least on near-term horizons, renters can actually secure lower payments (i.e., shelter deflation) depending on local market dynamics and their willingness to accept less space, fewer amenities and — I don’t know — more insects. (“We think of the roaches as pets. That one’s Matilda, there’s Jerry and over there in the corner is Oscar. Oscar’s a real rascal!”)

Anyway, the 20-city index notched a 1.8% YoY gain for July, Tuesday’s update showed. That makes two months in row that the annual increase on the 20-city gauge undershot headline price growth. On a MoM basis, 15 out of 20 cities saw a decline, which the release called “a sharp turnaround from just a few months ago, when most markets were still eking out gains.” The National Index fell 0.2% in July from June unadjusted.

Nicholas Godec, Head of FICC at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said the data “reinforce that the housing market has downshifted to a much slower gear.”

“US home values have essentially stagnated after inflation, a striking reversal [from] the pandemic boom [when] home prices were climbing far faster than inflation, rapidly boosting homeowners’ real equity,” he went on. “Now, the situation has flipped: Over the last year, owning a home yielded a modest nominal gain, but an inflation-adjusted loss.”

Question for the renters among you: Do you feel like you’re “winning” now?