The Claim

Oversaw existing home sales rising to the strongest pace in three years as income growth finally outpaces home price gains.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

Two factual claims and one causal framing. Factual: (1) existing home sales rose to their strongest pace in three years, and (2) income growth now outpaces home price gains. Causal framing: “oversaw” implies the administration caused or managed both developments.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That the housing market is recovering under this president’s leadership. “Oversaw” is deliberately vague — not quite claiming credit, but positioning the administration as the steward of a positive trend. “Finally” implies a long-awaited turning point, suggesting conditions that were broken are now being fixed. The combined framing invites the reader to conclude that administration policies produced a healthier housing market.

What is conspicuously absent?

The full-year picture. December 2025’s 4.35 million SAAR was one strong month in a year that totaled 4.06 million sales — unchanged from 2024 and tied for the lowest annual volume since 1995. The “strongest pace in three years” is the peak of a single month, not a sustained trend. Also absent: the role of the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting cycle in driving both the December sales bump (lower rates bring buyers off the sidelines) and the home price deceleration (higher rates suppressed demand, slowing price growth). The administration “oversaw” an economy shaped overwhelmingly by monetary policy it did not control.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

Existing home sales in December 2025 reached their strongest seasonally adjusted pace since February 2023. NAR reported December existing home sales at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.35 million, up 5.1% from November and 1.4% from December 2024. Lawrence Yun confirmed the December pace was “the strongest in nearly three years.” The last month with a higher SAAR was February 2023 (4.58 million), approximately 34 months earlier, making “three years” a slight exaggeration but substantially accurate. ¹

Full-year 2025 existing home sales were 4.06 million — unchanged from 2024 and tied for the lowest annual volume since 1995. Despite the December spike, total 2025 sales matched 2024’s near-30-year low. Pre-pandemic normal was approximately 5.3-5.6 million annually. The 2025 monthly SAAR ranged from 3.98 million (June) to 4.35 million (December), with most months clustered between 4.00 and 4.15 million. One strong month at year-end did not rescue an otherwise deeply depressed year. ²

National home price appreciation decelerated sharply throughout 2025, falling well below income growth. The S&P Case-Shiller national index grew just 1.3% for full-year 2025 — the weakest annual gain since 2011 and 5.3 percentage points below the 10-year average of 6.6%. The FHFA House Price Index showed a similar deceleration: from 4.0% YoY in Q1 2025 to 1.8% YoY in Q4 2025. Meanwhile, BLS average hourly earnings grew 3.5-3.9% YoY through late 2025. Income growth did outpace home price gains by a substantial margin. ³

Real home price returns turned negative in the second half of 2025. With CPI inflation at 2.7% for the year and home price appreciation at 1.3%, real home values declined by approximately 1.4 percentage points. This reversed a decade-long trend where home prices had outpaced inflation by an average of 3.7 percentage points annually. S&P Dow Jones Indices highlighted that “inflation outpaced home price appreciation by 1.4 percentage points, effectively eroding real home values.” ⁴

The December median existing home price was $405,400, up just 0.4% year-over-year. This was the 30th consecutive month of YoY price increases, but the smallest such increase in the streak. Single-family median was $409,500 (up 0.2% YoY). The deceleration to near-flat pricing was a direct consequence of higher mortgage rates throughout 2023-2025 suppressing demand, combined with gradually increasing inventory (up 3.5% YoY to 1.18 million units in December). ⁵

Strong Inferences

The December sales surge was driven by temporarily lower mortgage rates, not by administration policy. Mortgage rates declined from 7.04% in January 2025 to 6.06% by mid-January 2026, driven by the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting cycle (175 bps between September 2024 and December 2025). As established in item 76, three of the six Fed cuts (100 bps) occurred under the Biden administration, and the one identifiable Trump administration action — the January 8, 2026 MBS purchase directive — came after most of the rate decline had already occurred. Yun himself attributed the Q4 improvement to “lower mortgage rates and slower home price growth” — both consequences of the Fed’s monetary policy, not executive action. ⁶

Home price deceleration was a consequence of the 2022-2024 rate surge, not a policy achievement. The mortgage rate spike from approximately 3% in early 2022 to over 7% by late 2023 crushed demand, eventually slowing price growth. The deceleration in 2025 was the delayed effect of years of reduced affordability and suppressed transaction volumes. This is a textbook monetary policy transmission mechanism, not an outcome any president “oversaw” in a meaningful causal sense. ⁷

Housing remained unaffordable by standard metrics despite the improvement. As established in item 76, NAHB data for Q4 2025 showed a family earning the national median income needed 34% of its income for a median-priced home — still above the standard 30% affordability threshold. The price-to-income ratio remained approximately 4.9x, well above the historically balanced 4x threshold. The “income outpaces home prices” trend was real but had only just begun to close a gap that would take years to normalize. ⁸

What the Evidence Shows

The two factual claims are substantially accurate. December 2025 existing home sales did reach their strongest pace in nearly three years (4.35 million SAAR, highest since February 2023), and income growth did outpace home price gains in 2025 (nominal wages growing 3.5-3.9% vs. home prices growing 1.3-1.8%). These are real, verifiable developments.

But the framing obscures more than it reveals. The “strongest pace in three years” was a single month’s reading at the end of a year in which total sales were unchanged at a near-30-year low. December 2025’s 4.35 million SAAR was a temporary spike, not a new baseline — January 2026 immediately fell back to 4.02 million, and February was 4.09 million. Describing one good month as “rising to the strongest pace in three years” is technically defensible but selectively omits that the full year was among the worst in three decades.

The income-outpacing-home-prices development is genuinely significant for housing affordability. But it is important to understand why it happened: home price growth decelerated because the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes in 2022-2023 crushed housing demand, eventually causing price appreciation to slow to its weakest pace since 2011. Income growth, meanwhile, reflected the tight labor market that preceded Trump’s inauguration. The administration’s contribution to either trend is negligible.

The word “oversaw” does real rhetorical work here. It positions the president as the shepherd of these trends without making a causal claim that could be fact-checked. But when we look at the actual drivers — Fed monetary policy for the rate decline that spurred December sales, and multi-year market dynamics for the price deceleration — the administration was a bystander to forces it did not initiate and could not meaningfully control.

The Bottom Line

The factual claims check out: December 2025 existing home sales were the strongest in nearly three years, and income growth genuinely outpaced home price gains throughout 2025. This is one of the more grounded claims in the economic section.

Steel-man: These are welcome developments for American homebuyers. The combination of decelerating prices and steady wage growth is exactly what the market needed to begin recovering from the 2022-2024 affordability crisis. The December spike, while one month’s data, suggested that lower rates could draw buyers back into the market. The administration can also argue that its fiscal and energy policies contributed to the broader inflation decline that enabled the Fed to cut rates.

But the claim’s framing is misleading in three ways. First, the “strongest pace in three years” cherry-picks one month from a year that was flat at near-30-year lows — the denominator problem. Second, “oversaw” implies agency over trends driven entirely by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy cycle and multi-year market dynamics. Third, the claim implies a housing market recovery that had not yet materialized: full-year 2025 sales were identical to 2024, homes remained unaffordable by standard metrics, and real home values actually declined. The claim takes genuinely positive trends and frames them as achievements, when the administration was a spectator to forces it did not create.

Sources

Footnotes

1. NAR Existing-Home Sales report, December 2025 data, published January 24, 2026. Mortgage News Daily: https://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/news/01142026-existing-home-sales-nar-inventory-prices-appr; Eye on Housing (NAHB): https://eyeonhousing.org/2026/01/existing-home-sales-climb-to-near-3-year-high-in-december/; HousingWire: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/december-existing-home-sales-hit-three-year-high/ ↩

2. Eye on Housing (NAHB), “Existing Home Sales Climb to Near 3-Year High in December”: full-year 2025 total of 4.06 million, unchanged from 2024, lowest since 1995. https://eyeonhousing.org/2026/01/existing-home-sales-climb-to-near-3-year-high-in-december/; FRED Series EXHOSLUSM495S: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EXHOSLUSM495S; Calculated Risk, December 2024 data showing full-year 2024 at 4.06 million: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2025/01/nar-existing-home-sales-increased-to.html ↩

3. S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Index, December 2025 release (February 24, 2026): national index +1.3% YoY, weakest since 2011. https://press.spglobal.com/2026-02-24-S-P-Cotality-Case-Shiller-Index-Reports-Annual-Gain-in-December-2025; FHFA House Price Index Q4 2025: +1.8% YoY, decelerating from 4.0% in Q1. https://www.fhfa.gov/reports/house-price-index/2025/Q4; BLS Real Earnings, November 2025: nominal AHE +3.5% all employees, +3.9% production/nonsupervisory. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/real-average-hourly-earnings-increased-0-8-percent-from-november-2024-to-november-2025.htm ↩

4. S&P Cotality Case-Shiller December 2025 release (footnote 3). HousingWire analysis: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/case-shiller-december-growth/ ↩

5. NAR Existing-Home Sales December 2025 data (footnote 1). Median price of $405,400, up 0.4% YoY. Inventory at 1.18 million, months’ supply at 3.3. ↩

6. Item 76 analysis of mortgage rate drivers. Fed rate cuts: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm; Freddie Mac PMMS 2025 data: https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/archive?year=2025; Lawrence Yun quote from NAR December 2025 press release (footnote 1). ↩

7. FHFA HPI quarterly data showing deceleration from 4.0% to 1.8% (footnote 3). Case-Shiller first-half 2025 gains of 2.6% followed by second-half declines across all 20 metros (footnote 4). ↩

8. NAHB, “Affordability Posts Mild Gains in Second Half of 2025 but Crisis Continues.” https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/press-releases/2026/03/affordability-posts-mild-gains-in-second-half-of-2025-but-crisis-continues; HousingWire, price-to-income ratio at 4.9x: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/housing-affordability-2026/; Item 76 analysis of affordability metrics. ↩