Breaking old news (there’s a joke there, don’t miss it): US home values rose at the slowest pace in 27 months during October, the latest update on Case-Shiller’s marquee price indexes showed.

The figures, released Tuesday on the usual two-month delay, suggested annual price appreciation continued to struggle, a trend that began in February.

The chart below gives you a sense of things. The 1.3% YoY increase on the headline 20-city gauge was the slowest since July of 2023.

The broader, national gauge posted a 1.4% gain, slightly quicker than the prior month.

“October’s data show the housing market settling into a much slower gear,” Nicholas Godec, S&P Dow Jones’s head of FICC said. “This is the weakest annual home price growth since the March through July 2023 period, when the market was absorbing the initial shock of the Fed’s rapid rate hikes.”

As was the case in September, the data betrayed a marked regional divergence as prices in “pandemic darlings” (as the accompanying editorial put it) underperformed, while markets which lagged during the post-COVID housing bonanza remain a semblance of firm.

In the normal course of business, I’d show you a chart comparing the update on overall annual price growth to headline inflation. Recall that the latter’s outpaced the former since mid-year with the effect of eroding homeowners’ real housing wealth.

Alas, the US government didn’t publish an inflation report for October, so an apples-to-apples comparison’s not possible. (Indeed, the November CPI report was widely criticized for assuming no shelter inflation the prior month.)

Even without the October CPI figures (and setting aside the questionable assumptions built into November’s release), it’s safe to say home price growth undershot overall inflation two months ago, which in turn means real housing wealth contracted a fifth month.

Tuesday’s price update came on the heels of a surprisingly robust read on pending home sales, which rose smartly in November, according to the NAR.

Broadly speaking, US housing enters 2026 as something of a conundrum. Financing costs have come down but remain too high for many struggling renters. And although sellers outnumber buyers by the widest margin in over a decade, there’s little evidence to suggest homeowners are inclined to the kind of price cuts necessary to thaw the resale market in earnest.