Where Home Prices Rose (and Fell) in 2026 — And Where Jacksonville Fits
If you've spent five minutes on Instagram or X lately, you've probably seen someone predicting the housing market is about to fall off a cliff. Some of those posts are pretty convincing.
Here's what the actual data says: home prices are up 2.1% nationally over the past year, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. That's a bit faster than where we started 2026, and prices have now risen every single quarter since 2012 — through higher rates, through inflation, through everything else this market has thrown at buyers and sellers.
So where does Jacksonville fall in all this? According to FHFA's own numbers, our metro actually dipped slightly, down about 0.4% year-over-year, even as Florida as a whole ticked up. That puts us closer to the cooling markets in this report than the hot ones, which tracks with what a lot of us have been feeling on the ground here lately.
Where prices are climbing fastest
The states seeing the biggest gains this year: Alaska (8.3%), Vermont (7.3%), Hawaii (5.8%), Illinois and West Virginia (5.6% each), Wisconsin and North Dakota (4.8%), and Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey (around 4.7%). Most of these are Midwest and Northeast markets, where there simply aren't enough homes for sale to keep up with demand.
Where prices are cooling off
Four states actually saw prices drop over the past year: New Mexico (-1.2%), Washington (-0.9%), Colorado (-0.5%), and California (-0.2%). A few others, including Texas and North Carolina, grew less than 1%. Notice the pattern? These are largely the same Sun Belt and Western markets that ran hottest during the pandemic. They're cooling, not collapsing.
City-level numbers tell an even sharper story. Elgin, Illinois led the country at 7.7% growth, while Everett, Washington posted the steepest drop at -3.7%. San Francisco's quarterly number looked alarming (down 9.1%), but its year-over-year change was a much calmer -2.4%. That's the lesson here: short-term numbers swing hard. Year-over-year tells you what's actually happening.
What it means if you're buying or selling here
If you're thinking about listing, knowing whether Jacksonville is heating up or cooling off helps you price it right and pick the right time to go live. If you're buying, that same data tells you whether you're negotiating in a market that favors you, or one where you need to move fast and lead with your best offer.
One more thing worth saying: no two streets tell the same story, even within the same zip code. Your specific block, your school district, your home's condition — all of that matters more than any national headline. If you want the real answer for your address, that's a conversation, not a guess. Reach out and I'll pull the actual numbers for your street.
—Matt