We Put Every 2025 Real Estate Prediction on a Scoreboard — Here's Who Got It Right

Every major housing analyst made predictions for the 2025 real estate market. Interest rates were supposed to fall. Home sales were supposed to rebound. Inventory was going to loosen up. So — who actually got it right?

In this episode, Gary Pickren puts every major 2025 real estate market prediction on the scoreboard and measures it against what actually happened. For South Carolina real estate agents heading into 2026, this is the accountability check that tells you whose forecasts are worth following — and whose aren't.

What's covered:

• The biggest 2025 housing market predictions for interest rates, home sales volume, inventory, and home prices — and the actual outcomes
• Which real estate experts and analysts got 2025 right, who missed badly, and what that track record means for their 2026 forecasts
• What the gap between 2025 predictions and reality reveals about the limits of housing market forecasting
• How South Carolina real estate agents should weigh expert predictions when advising buyers and sellers in 2026

Before you trust any 2026 real estate forecast, know how the same forecasters did in 2025. This episode gives you the scorecard — and a sharper lens for the year ahead.

Don't forget to like us and share us!
Gary

* Gary serves on the South Carolina Real Estate Commission as a Commissioner. The opinions expressed herein are his opinions and are not necessarily the opinions of the SC Real Estate Commission. This podcast is not to be considered legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your area.    

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is Ditch and Dirt with Gary Pickering. South Carolina's only podcast dedicated to the real estate agent craft. And now the host of Dish and Dirt, Gary Picker. I'm your often opinionated, but rarely wrong host, Gary Picker, coming to you from the beautiful downtown Columbia, South Carolina offices of Blair Cato Pickering Castle line this, the first week of January 2026. That's right, brand new year. We finished out 2025 strongly and are starting a brand new year of Dish and Dirt in 2026. And we really appreciate you joining us for this brand new year. Got a lot on the plate in January already. Got the whole of January, most of February already planned out. Got some very important topics to cover. I believe that 2026 is going to be a pivotal year in real estate. I think we're going to see a lot of changes. I'm still predicting some things when it comes to broker-to-broker compensation, as well as bonuses and things of that nature. So we've got a lot to cover in 2026. After 2025 was a significant year in real estate. I think we'll look back over the next couple years here and we'll think about wow, what a tremendous pivotal year that 2025 was. Massive changes that people didn't want that actually wound up working out fairly well for the entire industry. As we entered in 2025, we had a lot of people very distraught about what the year was going to bring when in terms of commissions and how Sitzer Burnett was going to play out and all these new regulations and what sales were going to happen, affordability. And so we were very concerned. And that's what this show's about today. We're going to look back at some of those predictions in terms of financial predictions and see how our so-called experts did in that. Before we begin, however, I do want to wish the very best to Austin Smallwood. As y'all know, Austin at the South Carolina Realtors Association, I'm sure you've heard by now, has decided to take another position in a different industry. He'll still be in government regulation and so forth and lobbying, but he will no longer be with the Association of Realtors, and that is a huge loss for us at the Realtors Association, as well as just in the state of South Carolina and real estate in general. Austin is one of the absolute best when it comes to understanding 4057. I've enjoyed our many days sparring over the statute, talking in front of realtor groups and doing debates in front of realtor groups. So I've enjoyed having him at the real estate commission traveling. I got to travel with him not only to Nashville but to Montreal for Rillo meetings. And uh really got to know and appreciate Austin, his uh wit, his dry wit, uh, his humor, his knowledge. And uh just wish him the absolute best and most success in his new endeavors. I am also very confident uh that the Realtors Association will find someone very talented to fill that position. We're looking forward uh to working with whoever that person might be as well. But uh wish Austin the very best. I know that he will be missed. I know a lot of y'all who listen to this podcast also talk to Austin quite a bit and get his opinions on a lot of things as well. Secondly, got a new podcast coming out, guys. Dishing dirt wasn't enough, so we're gonna do another one. It's gonna be a little bit different, though. This one's called Dishing Data, and it's gonna help real estate agents master artificial intelligence, and we're gonna do it one week at a time. Guys, real estate's an ever-changing industry. It's changing faster than ever. Agents who learn to use AI the right way, the smart way, they're gonna win more clients, save more time, make a lot more money, and they're gonna stay ahead of the competition. The top agents in your industry already are using AI. I'm telling you right now, if you look at the top five, six agents in the industry, in your market in South Carolina, they are already using AI and they're using it very effectively to manage their load, to manage their schedule, manage their clients, their leads, and everything else. You've got to get there. Now, like you, I'm 56 years old. This kind of stuff scares me. It's like, how do you do this stuff? I don't even know how to find it, what do I need to know? And that's why we created Dish and Dirt AI Edition. It's gonna be a weekly 15-minute companion piece of this podcast, Dish and Dirt, where we're gonna break down exactly exactly how AI works, how you can use it in your real estate business without overwhelming you, without scaring you, without giving you all this technical jargon. It's gonna be user-friendly and it's gonna be related exactly to real estate. So each week I'm gonna sit down, sit down with Candace Coleman, she's one of our great attorneys here at Blair Cato in the Midlands, and she's gonna learn a brand new AI tool or technique in real estate each week, and then she's gonna share that with you. So you're gonna get a front row seat to what works, what doesn't work, how you can put it to use in your business immediately. We're gonna cover everything from writing listing descriptions in 30 seconds, creating social media content in a matter of minutes, building buyer and seller guides, repurposing video content multiple times, and then we'll start getting into how to do lead follow-up, AI safety concerns for your clients, how you can use your contracts through AI, all the advanced automations that can come in. And we're gonna get all the way from the beginning as we continue throughout the year, from the easy things of how to do some of the stuff like legal descriptions, writing emails, all the way up to how can I have my own AI assistant. So you're gonna learn all kinds of stuff over this year. If you're a realtor who wants to work smarter, make more money, serve your clients better, stay ahead of the curb, don't be uh not to be pushed out of this business by technology. This is gonna be the podcast for you. We lawyers can figure this out and explain it to you in 15 minutes. There's absolutely no reason you can't implement this in your business. New episodes will drop every week. We should start here in a week or so. It's Dishin Data AI Edition. So we'll be digging in. Look forward to that. Now, also before we start, the annual real estate success summit is already scheduled for February 11th at the Synergy Buildings, just like last year. It's going to be a fantastic show this year. We are we have spent three or four years now talking about marketing. Now we're moving over into sales. So this is gonna be a highly motivating, sales-based seminar for you to learn all about sales, how to make the sales, how to close the sales, how to do the sales, and we're bringing in some of the best sales experts in the industry to teach you. And we start off bringing back Krista Michor, one of the greatest in our industry, period. She'll come back and we're gonna give her two hours at this uh seminar to talk to you all about sales, how to make sales, how to close sales, how to get sales. So you're gonna be really excited to have her there. Justin Tucker, he's in the title industry. He's one of the best ever. He's gonna show you how to use AI, talking about AI. We're gonna talk a lot about AI at this meeting. Brian D. April, he is going to talk about how to do sales through data. And then last but not least, we're gonna have our good friend Garrett Maroon coming in talking about sales and how to close sales in his industry as well. So we're very excited, have a great lineup for you, and it's going to be a fantastic event. Tickets will be going on sale very shortly. We'll have more information about that. You're gonna want to get your tickets quickly. Last year we sold out. We had a list of like 10 or 12 people who wanted to get in who couldn't even get in because it sold out. So when we come live with our tickets, you need to get your ticket as quick as possible. All right, let's go on with our show. So last year, about this time, I do one of my favorite shows every year. It's the yearly predictions. I scour the internet and try to find all the information from Redfin and NAR and Realtors and Zillow and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all of the other big names in the industry to give us those yearly predictions concerning price, inventory, mortgage rate, sales, and all the things that are going to affect how your business looks in 2025. And we did that last year. And we've done it every year before. Now we're gonna do it also in 2026. But before we give you the 2026 predictions next week, what I want to do is go back and look at the 2025 predictions and see what our so-called experts said and how they did on their predictions. Why that is important is if we're going to believe what they tell us in 2026, we got to see how they did in 2025. If they are pretty close to being accurate, then that makes a good idea, a good reason to believe that 2026 predictions will also be accurate. If they're wildly off, then what good's their predictions in 2026? So let's see how our so-called experts did, and let's see if they got the numbers right and whether we can believe them coming up here for 2026. Let's start with the overall market sentiment. What most, if not all, of the experts predicted in late 2024, early 2025 was that they saw 2025 as a positive year for the housing market. They believed it was a modestly positive year. They didn't believe it was going to be a blowout year like we've seen some years, but they did believe it was going to be modestly positive. They believed in modest growth, which we got. They believed the market was gonna stabilize, which I think it did. They thought there'd be more favorable condition than in the past year. And I think there was more favorable market conditions where inventory mortgage rates went down. Still some issues. Affordability remains an issue. It will remain an issue for years. I don't know that it's ever going to be a non-issue, but that was one of the problems that probably kept it to be a modest growth year and not an extreme growth year. Now let's look at some of the individual things that we talked about. The first thing we talked about was home sales. Would we see an increase year over year, number of houses sold in a given year? Most of the forecasts back last year were predicting an increase in home sales in 2025 over 2024. They were fairly modest. Couple were out there, but for the most part, they were very modest. We saw ranges from 22 to 9% by Redfin, 5 to 12% was NAR, MBA, Zillow, and Fannie Mae. Some of the more conservative forecasters were anticipating 1-2% growths. Everybody was saying there was pinup demand, there was rising inventories, and there would be better job growth, which would help fuel that optimism and get the market moving. NAR at the time was very bullish. They were saying 9 to 12% year-over-year increase. I think they were too bullish, quite frankly. They believed there was an improvement in the job market. There would be stock market gains, easing of affordability constraints, and that would bring in more buyers. At the same time, the Mortgage Bankers Association was more of a middle range. They were looking at that 5.1% increase in home sales. They said that their outlook was based on the number of mortgage application trends and the refinancing and purchase activity at the end of 2024 and early 2025. Phillow was predicting around a 7% increase in home sales. Their forecast was based largely on current sales volume, paces, and inventory improvements and so forth. They were looking at a 4.2% increase in growth. They had concerns about the economic and housing data when they were using their estimates for total of units sold. And then lastly, we looked at realtor.com, and they were very bearish at 1.5%. Realtor.com expected just modest increases in inventory, and they thought that would keep down the number of sales. In general, how did they do? Well, let's look at that. Well, pending sales according to NAR, when you looked at it year over year in November, we're up about 2.6% for that month. That was showing the strongest we had seen since early 2023, which was suggesting that we were seeing sales momentum late in the year. Now that had followed a report in March also by NAR, which had shown that existing home sales at the seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million units, which was actually 2.4% lower than in March of 2024. And it represented a significant slowing in the early part of the year. So what does all this mean? Early in mid-year 2025, in fact, we started weaker than in 2024. And most of those earlier months showed that. Mortgage rates remained stubbornly high at that time. Buyers were slow to get back in the market. But by late 2025, we saw what these guys were predicting, which was pending contracts would start trending in a positive manner year over year, which was implying that we would see a late year rebound or strong end of the year. I think that's exactly what we saw. Nationally, there wasn't a clear, unequivocal increase across all of 2025 versus 2024, but the trend as it went throughout the year improved month over month. And particularly late in the year, we saw strong pending sales toward the year end. Regionally, we saw increases in the Northeast and Midwest year over year. The South was up year over year as well, as was the west, not as much, but all four regions did show year over year gains in pending contract by the end of 2025, even though some of the earlier recorded months in the year were very soft. South Carolina, the trends were no different. We saw the same thing. Sales in South Carolina were reported up to about 2.6% year over year as of September. Ranges in the state were up we saw from 1.3% to that 2.6%. So we saw some modest improvements, not earth-shattering improvements in sales numbers, but we did see some movement as well. When you break it down further into the individual markets, NAR reports a sales increase in Greenville. They also saw that the Spartanburg market had a modest increase, that some of the other regions like Columbia and Sumter also had very modest increase in sales. However, the shining spot in South Carolina, in fact, was Myrtle Beach. The Myrtle Beach zip code area showed a 14% closed sales year over year versus the previous year through October of 2025. And North Myrtle Beach was up 36.1% in closed sale, according to Coastal Carolina Realtors. So the data is suggesting that Myrtle Beach was a shining star in South Carolina and that it noticed a or saw a noticeable stronger 2025 versus 2024. So in conclusion, the the predictions weren't widely wrong. And some of the people who are a little bit more bullish might have been a little bit too strong in it. But the rates of sales did go up. We did see a slow start at 2025, but we did see a strong end, particularly from July on. And that was all over the country, all over South Carolina, and all over statewide. Statewide, our home sales looks like to be up somewhere around 2.6% with modest price increases. And again, Myrtle Beach was the most solid market that we had in the state. I think anybody who's been in Myrtle Beach recently will realize that's very true. Moving over to mortgage rates, if you'll remember back at the beginning of 2025, mortgage rates were on everyone's mind. Everyone was freaking out about mortgage rates. Would they push into the sevens? Would they push into the eights? Some people were hoping they would get back down to the fours. And so we spent a lot of the first part of the years lamenting over what the mortgage rates would do. Most experts predicted the rates to stay in the six. I think pretty much everybody said that. But they did predict some modest downward movement throughout the year. The predictions were by Redfin and USA Today that they would likely stay on the high sixes for the whole year, 6.8 throughout 2025. They just did not believe that the Federal Reserve was going to be aggressive in cutting policy rates because of inflation. Fannie Mae, their internal forecast, showed us decline modestly to around 6.3 by the end of the year. They did believe there would be some slight easing of inflation than mortgage pricing. Realtor.com, they predicted also 6.3. They saw their model showing some mortgage demand and affordability matters that would change some things. The Mortgage Bankers Association was also in that 6.4 rate. Com expert commentary, they also showed a modest decline in the neighborhood of 6%. So how did they do in those predictions? Let's look at it month by month because I don't think you can look at mortgage rates as a snapshot one time and say what they are. You kind of need to look at them over the year. So let's start with January. They were at 6.9% and increase into the sevens at 7.09%. That's when a lot of people started getting very nervous. But they did rebound rebound pretty quickly to 6.8, 6.9 in February, 6.7 to 6.8 in March. Please spare me your 6.7 jokes. April was 6.6 to 6.75. May got down 6.65 to 6.7. So we continue to see that mid-6 range. And then all of a sudden in June, those rates went up to 6.85 and caused a lot of consternation, a lot of concern. Oh no, we thought rates were going down, and in fact, they started going back up. However, we got relief back in July, back down to 6.7, 6.8, 6.7 in August, 6.6 to 6.65 in September. And then the big drop came in October down to 6.25, November, 6.23%, even with the government shutdown. And then in December, we were down to 6.2 to 6.25. So what's the conclusion? Rates started high, got near seven into the sevens, and dropped throughout the year. And mid-year was kind of in that mid-sixes. And by the end of the year, we were down in the low sixes, which was pretty much what everybody predicted. Everybody was predicting it would stay in the sixes. And uh Fannie Mae and Realtor.com, they all got it pretty much right, down to 6.3, and that's pretty much where we are 6.2, 6.3. So good job on the predictions there. Now, one thing that is very interesting about these mortgage rates, you took a rate that was at seven in January, and you went all the way down to 6.2 by the end of the year. Typically that would result in a major refinance boom. Didn't materialize, didn't happen at all. We did very few refinances throughout the whole year. Every lender I talked to, very limited in refinances. They were telling me they would call a client. Well, I'm waiting for it to come down more. And I think there's this misconception by a lot of uh borrowers who might have borrowed in the upper sixes, who think that interest rates are going to get back down into the fours or threes like it did pre-COVID. That's not gonna happen, guys. I just don't see that. Definitely not gonna happen in 2026. So people are holding out with opportunity to make some money and save some money. They are actually probably gonna delay even longer costing themselves even more money. You know, the difference between refinancing at 6.2 and 6.0, you know, what's the difference in your mortgage payment when you're saving can go ahead and save that money now. So maybe we'll see this refinance movement 2026. I don't know. We'll see. Um, but it was just a very interesting thing that it did not materialize at all. Now let's talk about inventory. Inventory, as you'll remember, at the beginning of 2025 was also a big concern. Everybody was very uh worried that the inventory was going to take five to 10 years to finally get back to a balanced market. There simply was no inventory, particularly in certain uh price brackets in South Carolina and throughout the country. And so a lot of our experts were predicting significant increases in inventory. We saw a 10 to 15% prediction by AZ Big Media. Ultra.com was predicting significant increases. And so everybody was expecting a rise, moderate to significant, in inventory, because inventory remained a key obstacle in getting people back into the market. So let's look and see how it went. To give you some examples here, total inventory of existing home sales nationally in 2025 was higher than in 2024, according to Realtors, uh, National Association of Realtors. It grew from 1.37 million units to around 1.52 million units year over year. Um, that was approximately a 10.9% increase year over year in October of 2025. In November, the total inventory was 1.43 million, which was 7.5% higher than November of 2024, according to NAR. The month supply of inventory rose from around 3.8 months in November of 2024 to about 4.2 to 4.4 months in 2025. So what we got, the interpretation of that, is that we had years of exceptionally tight supply, but now the inventory moved higher in 2024, expanding the selections of homes for buyers and contributing more to a balanced market and keeping prices at a normal growth rate. So why did our inventory change so much? Well, more homes came into the market because of higher mortgage rates encouraged some owners to go ahead and sell now, slightly slowing of buyer demand, affordability issues, and a gradual shift toward a more balanced market. In South Carolina, we've seen some uh reports from Hazoo that says South Carolina inventory grew as much as 6.7% year over year. We saw in some particular markets and some particularly particular price brackets growth as much as 18.1%, which drove monthly supplies all the way up to 3.9 months. That was given to us by Fast Stats. The takeaway was in South Carolina, we did see stronger inventory growth then across the country. And this material increase for home sales in 2025 is great, much greater compared to 2024. Same thing when you looked at all of the uh individual markets. Myrtle Beach continues to show good increases compared to other markets in South Carolina. The month supply is a key inventory measure because it it reflects how long the available homes in that particular market would last at the current sales trends of no other houses were added. Nationally, we saw a 3.8 month uh in late uh 2024 to around 4.2 to 4.4 in late 2025. And that's a significant increase. And in South Carolina, we saw the same type of increase. For context, a balanced market is usually defined as four to six months of supply. So both nationally and in South Carolina, we saw inventory moving closer to that four to six month supply. So we're getting more into a balanced market. Some more stats we saw, U.S. nationally, they believe will end up somewhere between eight to eleven percent increase year over year. Some are still predicting uh at fast stats that when the year is over and we get to go back and look at all these stats, that South Carolina might be up as much as six to eighteen percent year over year, depending on which market you are in. So good takeaways from there. We're outpacing the national gains. When you look at our individual markets, Greenville, Spartanburg, we're definitely seeing a much more balanced market in both of those markets. We're seeing that expanding supply and steady inventory growth. It's not overheated, but it is growing in the Columbia market. We're also seeing the same thing as well. We're showing 23 days now from pending to sell. But again, we're seeing our greatest inventory growth as well as our uh sales in the Myrtle Beach area. Next, let's look at home prices and see how our home prices did. Prices, as you remember, everybody was concerned that prices were continue to grow, creating a more affordability issue and pushing more and more people out of the market. Certainly, it did happen in some aspects over the past couple of years, but the good news was. Was most of the experts in 2025 thought that prices would continue to rise, but only modestly. They didn't believe they would fall, but they believed they would continue rising modestly. We were seeing forecasts from NAR at 2%, Goldman Sachs at 4.4%, RedFenZillo, Fannie Mae were on that 2% to 4% rate. Redfin, in fact, predicted 4% growth because they believed high demand and persistent inventory constraints would drive prices higher. Realtor.com was showing 3.7%, also looking at the inventory issues. That was the 29th consecutive year-over-year increase. However, it was below 2%. So that's was very good. NARS data via Fred, FRED, also showed the medium sales price staying elevated throughout 2025 with home prices around 2% plus above 2024 level. So in that 1 to 2% range was where we were looking at. In fact, the third quarter, NAR's metro data showed price increases up only 1.7% year over year to about a 426,800 in those metro areas. So the bottom line was what we saw was modest price increases nationally of 1 to 2%. Regionally it was a little bit different. In the Northeast, it was up 6.5%. In the Midwest, it was 4.6. When you look at the South, the numbers aren't all in yet, but they believe that was a little bit more modest trend as well. Now looking at South Carolina, what we saw was that Radfenn, RadFed data showed South Carolina home prices$379,500 for the median home price in November of 2025. That was only a 0.6% year over year increase. Some local market summaries we did see through in Tempest property management showed that 3.1% year over year on a broad range of markets in South Carolina. Another data set, however, showed that the average South Carolina home value from Zillow was only up 0.4% over the year. So the conclusion was in South Carolina you were somewhere between 0.4% and 3.1, depending on your individual market. Again, very, very modest increases. When we look at it regionally, it looks like in South Carolina, the Greenville upstate, you're looking at about a 1.5% increase. The Columbia market, kind of all over the place, we saw some strong annual gains of 12.6% in some markets, but most markets did not reflect that type of increase. Myrtle Beach was showing 2% to 4%. Florence areas and other places in the low country were showing 0.4% year over year. So in summary, basically you were looking at a 1.1 to 2% increase year over year nationally, which is very modest. You were seeing in South Carolina ranges anywhere from 0.4 to 3.1%. Greenville being an example of 1.5%. Some of the early data in Columbia did suggest that certain markets saw in very aggressive 12.6%. However, I think what you're going to see in Colombia is going to be around that 2-4% rate as well, because overall the state average 0.6% to 3.1. So once again, I think our takeaway there is that our experts predicted modest growth. In fact, that's what it was. It was very modest growth, not only nationally, but in South Carolina as well as in these local regions within South Carolina. So modest growth, the 1 to 2% range seemed fairly good. Now in that podcast, we also talked about some other key predictions. A couple of things, there was talk about whether or not we'd have a housing crisis or housing crash, and everybody was saying basically no. That turned out to be correct. We did not have that house crash. We also saw that cost of home ownership, taxes, insurance, and maintenance would remain a major factor. That absolutely stayed true. The profile of the buyer would also shift to a much older person, someone around 38 years old for the first time home buyer. That happened. We saw more cash purchases and alternative down payment sources. That happened. And we also predicted single women buyers would outpay single men buyers. And of course, that happened as well. So what's our bottom line? The bottom line is when you look at the 2025 so-called experts and their predictions, they were very cautiously optimistic. And in fact, I think they pretty much were spot on. They said we would have more home sales in 2025. They were correct. They said that would be a modest increase. It was a modest increase. They said mortgage rates would be stubbornly high around 7%. Upper six is 7%, and would remain so throughout the first part of the year, but they would start dropping near the end of the year. They nailed that. We're down to 6.2%. So that was right on inventory. They said the inventory would climb, but it would still be tight. Inventory climbed, probably greater than they anticipated from various factors, but the inventory did climb to the rates that they expected. And now we're back into more of a more balanced market. They also predicted that home prices would rise, but very modestly. I think they hit that, that one to two percent increase in prices. And they also predicted that buyer dynamics would continue to evolve, and that's happening. So my my belief is that these so-called experts did a fairly good job, if not a great job, predicting 2025. Therefore, I think what they have to say in 2026 is very important. We can believe what they did in 2025. I certainly think we can believe what they predict in 206. So we'll have that prediction show coming up here in the next week or so. Very excited to let y'all know what these experts predict. So spoiler here, everybody's predicting a good year in 2026. I feel like I can already feel 2026 is going to be a strong year. All right, so that takes care of our show today. Appreciate you tuning in for another episode of Dish and Dirt. Come back again next week for another episode, including the predictions of what we see happening in 2026. Also, don't forget to go ahead and get your tickets for the uh Real Estate Success Summit. Those tickets will be on sale any day now, as well as tune in to our new podcast on AI, which I will be giving you information on both of those matters as we continue to go through the next couple of days and weeks. All right. Thank y'all so much for tuning in. Hope everybody has a good week and a good January. And we'll see you again next week. Don't forget to share us, like us, and subscribe. Tell all the other real estate agents how awesome teaching dirty. I'll take care of