Mark Twain is famous for the (likely apocryphal) quote that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When current affairs are seemingly unbearable and make no sense, people find solace in events of the past. And it is human nature to draw comparisons to the past as a way to understand the present, Mark Fleming, chief economist with Fortune 500 financial corporation First American, previously told Fortune. So how do you make sense of a housing market that looks frozen, with little sales activity, albeit with some movement on prices nationwide?
In most ways, as Fleming and others have noted, last year’s housing market rhymes with one of the worst times in the modern era for real estate: the 1980s, when baby boomers entered homebuying age and weathered a nasty recession, high inflation, and sky-high mortgage rates. But as luck wouldn’t have it, there’s a little bit of that other famously bad housing market thrown in, too, as existing home sales have retreated to their slowest pace in more than a decade, recalling 2010 and the slow, decade-long recovery from the Global Financial Crisis.
