Zillow Forecast: Best and Worst Housing Markets of 2026

Hey, friends. It's Dave Meyer, host of the Bigger Pockets Podcast. I hope you are all enjoying the holiday season. To close out the year here on the Bigger Pockets Podcast, we're republishing a few of our most popular episodes this year from across the entire BiggerPockets podcast network. Today, it's an episode of On the Market originally published back on October 30. This show is me breaking down Zillow's 2026 metro level price forecast. So if you are curious whether Zillow thinks prices are gonna go up or go down in your region of the country, or maybe you're looking for a new market to invest in, or maybe you just wanna nerd out with me because you love looking at which cities are trending up and down, the next thirty minutes has all of that. So enjoy, and I'll be back with fresh new episodes starting January 2. Hey, everyone. Welcome to On The Market. Thank you all so much for being here. I'm Dave Meyer. And today, sort of going back to my roots, this is one of my favorite things to study and talk about, real estate markets. We're gonna talk about the regional trends that we're seeing, the opportunities to be had, and the risks you probably want to avoid. You might already know this, but there isn't really such thing as, quote, unquote, the real estate market. On the show, we cover the national market a lot because it's helpful to understand some big macro trends. But what really matters most to your actual portfolios, to the profits that you're actually generating, is what's happening on the ground in your local market. And, of course, we cannot cover every market in The US in today's show alone, but in this episode, we are gonna do a deep dive into housing prices into different regions, different states, different cities across The US, and help interpret what it all means. We'll start with just talking about what has been going on in 2025 and what we know about regional markets as of today in October 2025. Then we're gonna talk about this sort of interesting and fascinating paradox that's going on in the investing climate right now. Next, we'll talk about rent growth and how regional variances there should factor into your investing decisions. Then we'll even talk about forecast because we just got brand new forecast showing where prices are likely to go by Citi across The US into 2026. And lastly, I'll just go over my thesis about markets in general and just remind people what I recommend you do about all the information that we're gonna be sharing in today's episode. Let's do it. We're gonna start with the big picture. You've heard this on the show a lot recently, but everything is slowing down. That's what's happening on a national level. Of course, we've seen regional differences across the years, but the main thing I want everyone to know is even the …