Happy Friday! For some lucky folks, today is the last day of work for the year, with two weeks of downtime at home ahead — give or take the millions of American set to travel over the holidays.

It’s the time of year when our inboxes fill up with economic forecasts for the coming year, which the Marketplace staff takes with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Afterall, the late economist Ezra Solomon is credited with saying, “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

Still, it can be instructive to know what smart people with skin in the game are thinking about, going into a new year. With that in mind, let’s look at some forecasts for the housing market. 

Before we get to 2026, though, here’s how our informal panel of experts summed up the year in housing we’re leaving behind: Between the high cost of borrowing, stubbornly high prices, and all the economic uncertainty this year, they said, sales of both existing and new homes were pretty lackluster.

“I would say 2025 was a year of many headwinds, and as a result, a year of frustration, I think, for both buyers and sellers,” said Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com. “Overall, a year where nobody really walked away very happy.”

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, agreed. “Buyers were up against high mortgage rates, high prices, and sellers were feeling like they weren't getting the offers that they deserved in order to give up the record low mortgage rates they got during the pandemic,” she said.

Rick Palacios Jr., director of research at John Burns Research and Consulting, summed up the 2025 market with one word: “underwhelming.”

Most analysts expect sales of existing homes to pick up in 2026.

Fairweather is predicting a yearslong “housing reset” will begin next year, with gradually improving affordability. 

“Mortgage rates have already come down, and we think they're going to stay at these lower levels of around 6.3% for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, which means that it's going to be more affordable to buy a home next year,” she said.

Austin, Texas, was the poster child of the pandemic-era housing boom. But today, it’s a buyer’s market. Sales have slowed, prices have fallen, and sellers are offering concessions.

It’s a squishy term, all the more so after Trump administration officials up to the President himself demanded their release, then called them a hoax before acquiescing to Congressional demands for transparency — with some redactions. 

The New York financier and convicted sex offender left a huge paper trail when he died in 2019, and bits and pieces of that trail have shed new light on Epstein’s relationship with Trump,former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and many more public figures. 

The Justice Department released thousands of new documents today, and said more would be coming in the next few weeks. If you’re struggling to follow this story, the Wall Street Journal has a useful running list of what’s been disclosed so far. Here’s a gift link.