A jump in unemployment only pressures home prices if it produces forced sellers, and that is a high bar. Nobody can promise where prices go, so start with the mechanism. A large share of the workers most exposed to layoffs are lower-wage and rent rather than own, so a layoff wave does not put their houses on the market. And owners who do lose a job fight hard to keep a home when they are sitting on built-up equity and a low locked-in rate. They have every incentive to exhaust savings, refinance, or sell on their own terms long before a foreclosure. Keep the historical scale in mind. Unemployment reached roughly 10% in the fallout from 2008, and what actually drove that housing collapse was years of risky lending: buyers with weak credit, no down payment, no savings, and adjustable-rate loans they could not sustain. When those payments reset, the selling cascaded. Underwriting since then looks very different, so an identical setup is not baked in. If unemployment climbed, we would watch three things: inventory relative to buyers, the share of listings that are necessity-driven, and credit availability. Those say far more about price direction than the headline jobless number ever will.