Where the Market Stands and What’s Next
This ATTOM webinar, hosted by Jennifer von Pohlmann, Sr. Director of Content & PR at ATTOM, and featuring Mike Simonsen, Chief Economist at Compass, provides a data-driven overview of the U.S. housing market at the midpoint of 2026. The session explores the factors shaping market activity, including mortgage rates, lending trends, home prices, homeowner behavior, inventory conditions, affordability challenges, and foreclosure activity.
The webinar begins with an examination of mortgage rates and their continued influence on both buyers and sellers. Although rates have declined from recent highs, they remain well above the historically low levels seen during the pandemic. Combined with elevated home prices, higher borrowing costs continue to pressure affordability and limit purchasing power for many prospective buyers. At the same time, many existing homeowners remain locked into lower-rate mortgages, reducing their incentive to sell and contributing to ongoing supply constraints.
The session also reviews mortgage lending activity and how the market has shifted since the refinance boom of 2020 and 2021. While overall origination volumes have stabilized and begun to recover, today’s lending environment is driven primarily by home purchases rather than refinancing activity. The discussion highlights that buyer demand remains present, but higher financing costs continue to influence transaction volume and market activity.
Despite affordability challenges, home prices have remained relatively resilient. National price appreciation has slowed considerably from the rapid gains recorded during the pandemic, but prices remain near record levels. Rather than a broad national correction, the market has largely transitioned into a period of modest growth, with performance varying significantly across local markets.
Another key trend discussed during the webinar is homeowner tenure. Americans are remaining in their homes longer than in previous decades, with average ownership tenure now roughly double what it was in the early 2000s. The mortgage-rate lock-in effect continues to play a role in this trend, limiting the number of existing homes returning to the market and affecting overall housing supply.
The webinar also examines conditions in the distressed housing market. Foreclosure filings, foreclosure starts, and completed foreclosures have all increased from the exceptionally low levels seen during and immediately after the pandemic. However, ATTOM emphasizes that current activity remains well below the levels experienced during the Great Recession. While foreclosure activity continues to normalize, the data does not currently indicate the type of widespread distress associated with past housing downturns.
In the second portion of the webinar, Mike Simonsen provides additional perspective on market dynamics, including housing inventory, sales activity, pricing trends, and buyer behavior. His analysis highlights a housing market that is continuing to adjust to higher mortgage rates, with inventory improving in many areas, buyers becoming more price sensitive, and sellers increasingly adjusting expectations. The discussion points to a market that is gradually moving toward greater balance after several years of unusually constrained supply and heightened competition.
Overall, the webinar presents a housing market that remains active but continues to adapt to a higher-rate environment. Affordability challenges, mortgage-rate lock-in, shifting inventory levels, and evolving buyer behavior are all influencing market conditions. At the same time, relatively stable home prices and historically moderate levels of foreclosure activity suggest a market that is normalizing rather than experiencing broad-based distress.
This webinar also provides an overview of ATTOM’s core value proposition and breadth of data solutions. ATTOM is a one-stop shop for premium property data, offering flexible delivery solutions. Its mission is to power real estate transparency and fuel innovation across industries with the most comprehensive property data. The ATTOM Intelligence Table of Data Elements shows how ATTOM data is organized into 11 main categories. The core AI-ready Property Data provides a comprehensive foundation of property, market, and ownership data that is structured, standardized, and optimized for modern analytics and AI workflows. The newly introduced AI-Powered intelligence categories bring together four core analytics, each focused on a distinct dimension of property data, that work together to provide customers a complete foundation for analytics, modeling and decision-making.
ATTOM delivers AI-driven property intelligence built on one of the nation’s most trusted property data assets, covering 160 million U.S. properties—99% of the population. Our engineered, multi-sourced real estate data spans property tax, deeds, mortgages, foreclosure, environmental risk, property conditions, natural hazards, neighborhood insights, and geospatial boundaries, rigorously validated for advanced analytics. ATTOM supports analytics and AI-driven applications through flexible delivery options including APIs, bulk licensing, cloud delivery, and the MCP Server for AI-powered, agentic access to engineered property data—enabling organizations to automate analysis and scale property intelligence across industries.
Want to learn more about the latest housing market trends and outlook for the remainder of 2026?
Watch the full webinar for additional insights from ATTOM and Compass on the forces shaping today’s real estate market.
