Real home values in America just shrank for a seventh consecutive month.

“Just” isn’t quite accurate to the extent it suggests we’re talking about something that happened very recently. The S&P Case-Shiller updates come on a two-month delay. Tuesday’s data covers December.

That month, real housing prices on the marquee 20-city measure contracted 1%, extending a run of inflation-adjusted declines that dates to the summer.

“Inflation outpaced home price appreciation from June 2025 onward, eroding real home values through year-end and reversing a decade-long trend of positive real returns,” the color accompanying the release read.

This is the surest, safest route to improved housing affordability in America: Declines in real home prices that are sustained and deep enough to matter for wage-earners trying to make the math work, but not so deep as to constitute a crisis for existing homeowners.

The problem, colloquially, is that this’ll take forever and a day. People don’t have that long, particularly considering the window for starting a family and raising a child in an owned home (instead of a rented residence) is temporally small.

For the full year 2025, national home prices rose a mere 1.3%, S&P Dow Jones’s Nicholas Godec said Tuesday. That’s “the weakest full-year gain since 2011 and 5.3ppt below the 6.6% 10-year annual average,” he added.

Whether this is good or bad depends on who you are. If you’re still trying to get your foot in the door and you’re enjoying wage growth that’s, say, 3.5%, it’s nice to hear that your annual pay gains are outstripping home price growth by more than 2ppt.

If you’re a homeowner, it sucks (to lapse again into a colloquial cadence) that your primary asset isn’t keeping up with headline inflation. But chances are, you can afford the “loss.” And even if you can’t, I doubt you’re going to get any sympathy from America’s 46 million rental “house”holds.