The Biggest Crash since 2008 just got worse (HOAs bankrupt)

A condo apocalypse is hitting the U S housing market in 2026. According to the wall street journal, we're in the worst condo market since the end of the last crash and values are officially going down all across the U S and the primary issue is HOA fees in some cities and buildings through over a thousand dollars a month and condo owners are now being forced to sell in distress. Because if you look at data from Zillow, you could see some cities have condo values that are down over 30% from peak. In Cape Coral, Florida, condo values are down 30% since 2022 in Oakland. They're down 29% in St. Petersburg, Florida. They're down 27% in Jacksonville. They're down 18% and I'm going to get into more of these declines in a second, everyone, because we're seeing sellers take huge, huge losses right now. I'm actually looking actively right now to buy a condo and I can tell you some of these price cuts from sellers are absolutely massive. I was looking in downtown Nashville and I'm seeing condo owners discount 150,000 from what they bought it for two or three years ago. This is a surefire crash right now and it's a signal of what could happen to the rest of the U S housing market. There's condos tend to dip first. There are more volatile asset class. You have the higher HOA fees. You have the fact that a lot of people own condos as second or third homes and that makes them more exposed to a downturn. According to the wall street journal article, condo values are down 1.9% year over year and they're quoting some people who are trying to sell condos and they're saying that we're going to lose big time on these condos sales and you know, really everyone, there's two fundamental driving factors here that I want you all to understand. And in a second I'm actually going to show you some condos on the market in the city I'm walking around in right now because this city is also seeing a condo market downturn. But the first thing is the HOA fees, right? You buy a condo. If you buy it with a mortgage, you got your mortgage interest, your taxes, but you also got that HOA fee. And in some cities like New York city, the HOA fee is usually over a thousand a month. If you go down to Florida, the HOA fees in certain buildings is also over a thousand dollars a month. I found a listing in Florida and St. Petersburg where the owner is cut the price 75% from peak value from a million down to 250 grand because they can't afford the HOA fees in the special assessments. The HOA fees are 1500, there's a 300,000 special assessment. So when you buy a condo, everyone, if you are looking to buy a condo, you got to be very careful because you're potentially buying a big liability in today's market. If you buy one, you could think you're getting a good deal and then all of a sudden you get smacked with a bill after you buy it for repairs that you didn't even know were coming. So when you buy a condo, you gotta make sure to check the special assessment history to check the most recent property condition report and reserve schedule. And you also got to make sure to check the balances in the bank account for the condo association. You want to see that they have enough money in the bank account that they're not going to have to do special assessments. Now, the other issue for condos everyone is the multifamily and apartment space because there's been a huge surge in the construction of new apartments in America. And some of these new apartments are pretty nice. I've actually lived in a lot of these apartments over the last decade as I've moved across the U S these luxury apartment developers build them. And oftentimes they give you three months free rent to move in and you get a lot of nice amenities and these apartments are now directly competing with the condos, right? Because you know, as someone who's owning a condo, you could always potentially rent it out to someone and keep it as an investment. But now the rental values of condos are dropping and dropping a lot due to the fact there's so many new apartments where you can rent as well. One city where this is happening most definitely is Austin, in Texas in Austin, the apartment rents are down 22%. Think about what that means for the value of condos. Folks, this is kind of like an interesting downtown area I'm standing in right now. This is actually a city in the South that you can see has a lot of beautiful architecture here, downtown, a lot of really nice old buildings. I'm here on a Sunday though. And this is just kind of a little bit of a ghost town walking around here. And the people who purchased some of the condos here downtown might be wishing they didn't. Now I polled you guys and I asked you the question, what type of house or home are you looking to buy? And by far, the vast majority of you want to buy a single family house. Over 70% of you are looking to buy a single family home. So most of you aren't interested in condos. In fact, only about 5% of you watching are interested in buying a condo. I think another 5% of you are interested in buying a townhouse and then another about 15% a new built home. And you know, so for most of you out there, you might be saying, well, Nick, I'm never going to buy a condo. So why do I really care about this? And the reason you should care about this is how condos show you where we are in the housing cycle overall. As I said earlier, condos are the most sensitive asset class compared to single family homes. And so condos are going down and going down hard. Eventually, I think the single family market's going to follow the condo market. And this is something that actually happened in the last crash. 05, 06, we started seeing the condo values actually go down first. You can see here on this graph and then the single family values followed. And then interestingly in the 2010s from that crash, you could see it was the condo values that really started recovering first. And I actually found an article from Zillow from 2015 talking about how condos were outperforming single family homes in 2015 in the recovery after the last crash. And so what's likely to happen is condos are likely to bottom first in this downturn, but then eventually they're likely to recover first as well. So that's how you could use condos as an interesting signal of where we are in the market, even if you're not someone actively looking to buy a condo. Now, for those of you that haven't figured it out yet, where I'm standing right now is downtown Birmingham, Alabama. We're about two hours and 45 minutes South of Nashville. I actually escaped down here this weekend to get out of the bad weather that was in Nashville this weekend. I'm filming around, was it January 25th, 26? Nashville just got hit by a bad ice storm. I saw that ice storm coming and I said, Hey, I got to have power. I got to still film videos. I was actually in the ice storm in 2021 in Texas. If you guys remember that Central Texas and Northern Texas in 2021 and got hit by a massive ice storm. I was in Austin at the time and I saw some like crazy stuff happen during that ice storm that I've never seen before. Like the entire city was out of power. Seven inches of snow. It's like my apartment building had pipes bursting. Water was coming out of like electrical sockets and light fixtures in the ceiling. I had never seen anything like that. It was like something in the shining. And ever since that moment, I basically take stuff like this really seriously. Like if there's bad weather coming or there's like a bad ice storm in the case of when I lived in Florida, if like there's a hurricane coming, I get out because it's not a situation I want to stay in. But anyway, I'm down here in Birmingham and this is a really interesting housing market because you know, Birmingham has a reputation as a high crime city. And you look at the data on violent crime, it's like somewhat true. There are pockets in Birmingham where there's a lot of violent crime and overall as a city and a Metro, it is above average for sure in violent crime. To be clear, it's not at the level of like a Memphis or a Little Rock, but it's definitely above average. However, this is extremely bifurcated city. You know, there's some parts that aren't so nice. There's other parts that are beautiful. Like some of the nicest neighborhoods I've found are on the Southeast side of Birmingham and cities like Vestavia, like median income, 160,000 homes costing a million dollars. You didn't even think that could be possible in Birmingham, Alabama, but there's a lot of concentrated wealth, particularly in Shelby County, which is to the Southeast. And this is a good lesson folks about how like, we shouldn't think of Metro areas and cities in isolation. Like there's just like one characteristic that rules them all because basically every town and city I go to on these road trips, there's areas that aren't so nice. There's areas that are really nice. There are areas that are in between. And if you are a home buyer or investor, it's very important that you understand that, that you don't just like write off an area because it has a bad reputation or that because an area has a good reputation. You don't just think that everywhere is good in that city to invest. We actually developed the data point on ReVenture app to help you all figure this out. It's called long-term growth score. And this long-term growth score from zero to a hundred can help you figure out how good an investment your neighborhood and zip code is in the long-term. And if we look here in Birmingham, big differences in long-term growth score. If we look in Nashville, big differences in long-term growth score. And the metrics we use to figure that out are the long-term appreciation, the wealth and the income, the demographic growth, the affordability and the valuation. Those metrics help you understand whether it's a good or bad idea to buy, not just for the short term, but for the long run and how much long-term appreciation you could get. Now Birmingham's market is definitely in the tank. Data on ReVenture app shows downtown that we have a minus 7.5% forecast in the next 12 months. Inventory is through the roof. Sales are plummeting. There was like two sales in December, 2025. So that's a signal of a downturn in the market. And I just found some listings that were really interesting. Like in this building behind me, these are condos. There's a two bedroom in this condo building on the market for over a million dollars in downtown Birmingham. I mean, how is that owner going to do who paid a million dollars in downtown Birmingham for a two bedroom condo? I mean, it looks beautiful. Don't get me wrong. Very nice loft condo, 2,600 square feet. But I mean, look around here, folks. It's a Sunday afternoon. This is not the most happening place. There's a cool Alabama sign right there. There's some nice theaters over there. Some decent food, some decent barbecue, but I don't know who would pay a million dollars for a condo in downtown Birmingham. You guys can let me know what you think about that. Other condos on the market here in Birmingham are around 220 to 350,000. They're actually more expensive than I thought they would be. Like they're not much cheaper than Atlanta. I don't actually think they're cheaper at all than Atlanta. Like I was just in Atlanta and I thought the condos there were much more affordable and looking at some condos there potentially to purchase for kind of a part-time home in Atlanta slash investment property. But it's funny folks. Like I'm kind of getting in the mix on this now myself personally, you know, I see the values dropping on condos. I like condos. I like living in cities and near cities and kind of coming and going. It's kind of a good thing for me. But even as I get in kind of negotiations on some of these condos and townhomes, I'm looking at, you know, they've cut the price a hundred grand, right? Like in some cases, the list prices are back to 2018, 2019 levels, but I still have this kind of insecurity about buying because of the HOA fees and the HOA structure. And you know, I'm reading the HOA docs for a lot of these condos. And like you realize that sometimes you have almost no power as a condo owner. There's these super majorities on the condo boards that can just decide everything. I looked at one condo building in Nashville. I looked at the budget, like what are they spending the money on? Why are the HOA fees 500 a month for the condo I was looking at in Nashville? The property manager makes 190 grand a year. And then the assistant manager also makes over a hundred grand, $300,000 in payroll for the two managers of the property. Granted, it's a nice property, but you know, it made me realize, Hey, you buy a condo, you could just get screwed on the HOA fees and have almost no control on how much your costs go up. Whether it's, you know, the salaries and wages for the people who operate the building or the insurance, right? One of the reasons why HOA fees are going up so much in Florida is because the condo insurance for the building itself has skyrocketed. And so all across St. Pete, where I used to live, I'm seeing 500, 600, $1,000 per month HOA fees, which just kind of nukes, you know, any idea of like getting a good deal. The price could go down 40%, but if your HOA fees over a thousand a month, you're not going to feel that good about buying. Now I've walked a bit here in downtown Birmingham. We're starting to get into a kind of dicier neighborhood. Maybe dicier is not the right word. Just a little bit, maybe run down. You could see here. This street has a lot of boarded up buildings. We have some boarded up buildings over here. And then you look down this street. You could tell there's not a whole lot, not a whole lot going on. I think another thing that happened, everyone is that a lot of downtown areas got worse during the pandemic. A lot of downtown areas saw their crime rates increase, their foot traffic, commercial foot traffic drop. And I think as a result, there was a mini exodus from a lot of downtown areas. When I, when I go on ReVenture app, it's actually really interesting and look at the one year forecast, our home price forecast, which you guys should definitely check out for your zip code. If you are an active buyer, you need to know what that forecast is so you can negotiate and know where prices could be heading. Almost every downtown area in the U S has a downward forecast. And that's not something intentional. We didn't say, Hey, downtown areas should have a downward forecast. It's due to the fact that the inventory and the days on market and the price cuts are all going up in downtown areas significantly. So here in Birmingham, there's a downward forecast in Nashville. There's a downward forecast in Atlanta. There's downward forecast Austin. There's a downward forecast in Dallas. There's a downward forecast, even in like Los Angeles, downward forecasts in Los Angeles, California, all across downtown Chinatown, even Hollywood, a lot of just the urban core areas are now going down and our forecast to continue to drop likely due to the fact that they did not perform so well during the pandemic. Now you can make an interesting argument about that. Will that eventually reverse right? And is there opportunity now showing up in certain downtown areas for investors and buyers? One such place would be San Francisco in downtown, San Francisco, a little bit of a rejuvenation is starting right now. If you read the articles about the AI boom apartment rents in San Francisco are now going up at the fastest rate of any Metro area in the U S they now have a good mayor in San Francisco who focuses on crime law and order in a pro development pro business. And the values in downtown San Francisco went down anywhere from 15 to 25% over three to four years. And so that market's starting to turn up a little bit, you know, could downtown San Francisco have bottomed has New York city bottomed. New York city went down 20% in the three years from 2022 to 2025. Could we see New York city start to have a comeback? You know, of course a lot of people there don't like the new mayor. We'll see what he actually does, but I'm just starting to see this story play out with the data and my travels across the U S the prices are dropping for condos and townhomes, especially in downtown locations. And then some of these downtown locations could tilt undervalued or already are undervalued in 2026. And so if you're an enterprising investor or buyer, you might want to start looking at these areas and start seeing, Hey, what kind of deal can I get? You know, how can I negotiate and get a cheaper price? Is there a price point where I would feel good about buying? Now let's talk about some other cities where the condo prices have really dropped. Everyone. I think we left off around Jacksonville at minus 18% earlier, Tampa minus 18% Naples, Collier County minus 17% Arlington, Texas minus 16% Detroit, Michigan minus 16% San Francisco minus 15% Denver minus 15% Aurora, Colorado minus 15% Seattle minus 14% Orlando minus 14% Boise, Idaho minus 13% Portland, Oregon minus 13% what I would suggest you guys do is download the reVenture mobile app to access this data. I've been using it on my road trip. It makes accessing the scores very easy. You can just hit the my location button on the top to get taken right to your zip code, open the card, see the price forecast, see the longterm growth score upgrade for a premium plan to see those data points. Very easy if you're on the mobile app.