It’s a great time to refinance mortgage debt you already have. Whether it’s a great time to buy a house depends on the future demand for housing in the local area.

If you pay today’s price for a house in Palo Alto or condo in NYC and those areas fall in popularity, it could easily be a bad call.

Condos in NYC have fallen about 10-20% lately (at least the ones I was looking at) so even with rising rates I doubt it could go underwater once the pandemic is over

It seems quite possible that, depending on the course of the pandemic (short-term) and a related long-term evolution of remote work in finance/tech, that the footprint of highly compensated employment and demand for real estate becomes much more spread out. In a scenario like that, coupled with 8% mortgage rates, I could easily imagine a 50% haircut to high priced real estate.

That’s true. I’m skeptical we will see high rates any time soon though since that will hurt the federal government’s solvency big time. And I think there will always be demand for real estate in trendy cities. But there are definitely scenarios in which the value further decreases.

I'm hoping it's a good time to sell because I just sold mine for 3x what I paid for it 10 years ago. But there could still be a lot of inflation coming up.