New Zealand: Housing Prices Have Crashed and Billions in Wealth Have Vanished

The article says prices went up 50% during the pandemic and now have fallen 18%.

This sounds more like a mild correction not a crash.

I feel bad for people that overpaid at the peak though.

I think that Washington, DC, area residential real estate sank by about 20% in 1991. It took quite a while for it to come back.

The decrease may be larger than you think. E.g. if a house was worth $100k, it went up to $150k, and then down to $123k. The net gains vs pre-covid are ~23% now, so people lost a little over half of the gains.

Whereas people who are priced out of the housing market instead enriched their landlords to an obscene amount in that same time frame, so pardon me for not shedding a tear for a homeowner that didn't make top tier gains.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230621001016/https://www.nytim...

Basically back to pre-COVID levels.

Only people who bought in the last two years or so are underwater.

Can’t walk away as easily as in the US though.

a fraction of the billions in wealth that had magically appeared during covid, largely because of government policy.