Following the housing boom during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, home prices soared—especially in luxury housing markets. But in some areas, luxury prices barely budged. Recent insight from housing market platform Realtor.com shows some luxury markets have even decreased from April 2020 to April 2024. In Washington, D.C., for instance, luxury prices are 1% lower than they were four years ago. Other markets, such as Toledo, Ohio, and Winston-Salem, N.C., have only seen slight price increases.
Several markets where high-end home prices haven’t skyrocketed are dense population centers that people left during the pandemic, when remote-work options allowed folks to live farther from their big-city jobs.
These already high-priced housing markets meant there wasn’t much room for prices to grow, especially given buyers’ ongoing affordability challenges, points out Hannah Jones, a senior economic analyst at Realtor.com.
