Falling home prices are mostly a headline problem: across most of the country prices are moving sideways to up, with real softness concentrated in specific markets. A subset of markets have come off their peak, and even many of those remain well above pre-pandemic levels. It is fundamentally a supply-and-demand story that plays out locally, one metro at a time. The markets seeing real softness tend to be the ones that absorbed the biggest pandemic-era in-migration and the most new construction, concentrated in parts of the Sun Belt (Florida, Texas, the Gulf Coast). Several forces stack up there: rising insurance premiums, higher HOA dues and reserve requirements, property-tax reassessments tied to recent appreciation, and builders who can still add plenty of supply, all meeting demand that higher rates have thinned. Where builders cannot easily add homes, prices have held far better. The more supply-constrained, higher-equity regions (the upper Midwest, the Northeast, and much of coastal California) have stayed flat to up, and some Rust Belt metros have posted strong percentage gains precisely because they started so affordable. No region is truly immune. The Northeast tends to be among the most insulated because of high equity, low locked-in rates, strong rents, and long-tenure owners who simply are not selling, though it has run up fast before. The honest read: check your specific metro's inventory against its pre-pandemic baseline rather than trusting a national headline.