US homes are still getting cheaper. In real terms, anyway.

To employ my standard joke: “Can you feel the savings?!”

Tuesday’s update on the marquee measures of national home prices in America wouldn’t have made it above the digital fold even if there wasn’t a war going on. But to my mind, the Case-Shiller data’s always worth a quick mention.

The “new” figures (the scare quotes are a reminder that this series always comes on a two-month delay) showed the headline 20-City Index rose a mere 1.2% in January. A little less, actually. That was the slowest annual pace of price appreciation since July of 2023.

Headline CPI ran 2.4% in January. The undershoot (for home price growth versus overall inflation) was the eighth in a row.

The broader, National Index, rose just 0.9% YoY to start 2026, undershooting headline inflation by an even wider margin — 1.5%.

Wage growth for non-managerial roles in America was 3.7% YoY in January. The implication is that in the race to catch the moving train that is the “American Dream,” the typical US worker gained 2.8ppt in “pace terms,” if you like.

Unfortunately, this is all far too little, far too late. Between the down payment burden and financing costs that look more like the pre-GFC average than the post-Lehman “new normal,” there’s no catching this particular train. Not for a lot of Americans.