The consensus on the US housing market leans heavily on single-family home resilience. The US condo price collapse unfolding across 33 larger markets tells a materially different story, one that the headline figures on residential property have been quietly obscuring.
According to data from the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), mid-tier condo and co-op prices through July have fallen by 15% to 33% from their respective peaks across those 33 markets. The peaks occurred between 2021 and 2024, with the vast majority landing in mid-2022. In nine of those markets, the decline exceeded 21%. In three, it exceeded 30%.
These are not rounding errors. They are multiyear, structural unwinding events.
The US Condo Price Collapse in Detail
Cape Coral, Florida leads the list at –33% from its July 2022 peak, with mid-tier condo prices back to mid-2005 levels. Oakland, California follows at –32% from its May 2022 peak. St Petersburg, Florida is down 30% from its October 2022 peak. Austin, Texas has given back 28%. Fort Myers, Florida, another Gulf Coast market, is off 27%.
Six of the 33 markets have now dropped below their Housing Bubble 1 peaks of 2006: Oakland, Sarasota County, Cape Coral, Contra Costa County (East Bay), Fort Myers, and Orlando. Prices in those cities are, in effect, back where they were roughly 20 years ago. The long-run gains since January 2000 remain positive in most cases (Houston being the most modest at 64%) but the framing of ‘still up since 2000’ offers cold comfort to anyone who bought in 2021 or 2022.
Two cities crossed the –15% threshold in July: Houston, Texas, which peaked in August 2023, and Tempe, Arizona, which peaked in July 2022. No market that appeared on the list in June exited it in July. The direction of travel is one-way.
A further 37 larger cities have recorded declines of 8% to 14% from their peaks. San Antonio and Dallas are each at –14%, meaning a few further months of softness would push them into the more severe bracket. Dallas peaked in 2023; San Antonio in 2024. Neither is showing signs of stabilisation. This is consistent with data from Zillow Group Investor Relations, which places Tampa at –6.2% year-over-year in annual home value declines across all home types, followed by Austin at –6%, Miami at –4.6%, Orlando at –4.3%, and Dallas at –3.9%. The condo-specific numbers are considerably worse than those blended figures suggest.
Why the Broader Market Data May Be Understating the Damage
The blended citywide figures mask the severity because condos typically make up a smaller share of total home sales in most markets. In densely populated urban centres, condos and co-ops represent a large or majority share of transactions, Manhattan being the obvious example, where mid-tier condo prices are down 17% from their June 2022 peak. But average-all-homes indices absorb the condo implosion inside a much larger single-family dataset.
The geographic concentration of distress is also worth noting. Fast Company reported that among 77 major metro markets with falling year-over-year home values, the steepest declines included Punta Gorda, Florida at –7.9%, followed by Cape Coral at –6.1%, North Port, Florida at –5.3%, and Naples, Florida at –4.4%. Florida’s Gulf Coast is not experiencing isolated weakness; it is the epicentre of a coherent regional unwind, and condo-specific data makes that even plainer.
The underlying dynamics that make condos uniquely vulnerable are structural, not cyclical. Land appreciates over the long term; buildings depreciate toward zero. Each condo owner holds only a fractional claim on the land beneath the structure. Special assessments for long-deferred major repairs, a particularly acute issue in Florida, add unpredictable cost burdens. Homeowners’ association fees have risen sharply at many properties, partly driven by insurance costs in natural disaster zones. If a building appears on Fannie Mae’s so-called blacklist, financing a unit becomes difficult and the buyer pool contracts to cash purchasers.
Then there is the investor-specific dynamic. Non-resident foreign buyers, who treated condos in Sun Belt and coastal markets as a vehicle for capital parking, have become net sellers. Domestic condo investors face direct competition from a wave of newly completed, higher-end apartment buildings actively seeking tenants. These are not second-order pressures; they are primary drivers of the supply-demand imbalance that is extending declines month after month.
The price explosion that preceded all of this ran to 50%, 60%, even 70% in some cities over the two years from mid-2020 to mid-2022. In the decade to the peak, prices in these markets had risen by 180% to 350%. The unwind, now running at –15% to –33% from peak across 33 markets and –8% to –14% across a further 37, is substantial, but it is operating against an enormous prior baseline. As Wolf Richter noted on WOLF STREET, some of these charts show current prices running in a straight line back to 2005. That context alone reframes what ‘down 33%’ actually means in practice.
