Is the 2026 housing market favoring buyers or sellers?

The market is tilting toward buyers. Unsold housing inventory hit 1.62 million units at the end of August 2026, the highest level since November 2019, with 4.9 months of supply — the highest reading in more than a decade. Nearly 60% of homes are now selling below their original asking price.

Real Estate & Housing: two very different stories right now

Q: What is the current mortgage rate in September 2026?

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.76% as of September 10, 2026 — its third consecutive weekly increase, up from 6.35% a year earlier.

Traditional housing is cooling while data centers are the fastest-growing real estate asset class that exists.

Investment angle: Data center REITs delivered 38.99%-45.05% total returns over the twelve months ending April 2026 — dramatically outperforming traditional real estate's roughly 13% return over the same period. The driver is concrete: the six largest US hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, and CoreWeave) are projected to spend approximately $700 billion on data center capex in 2026 alone, nearly six times 2022 levels, with JLL forecasting global data center capacity roughly doubling from 103 GW to 200 GW by 2030 — up to $3 trillion in total required investment. Meanwhile traditional housing tells the opposite story: the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.76% as of September 10, 2026 — its third consecutive weekly increase, up from 6.35% a year earlier — while existing-home sales slowed to 3.98 million annualized in August, the lowest pace since June 2025. For an individual investor, the practical routes into the data center boom are listed REITs (Digital Realty, Equinix, Iron Mountain) or digital-infrastructure ETFs — not buying a data center directly.

Related: AI & Robotics — Infrastructure (the hardware behind the data centers) →

Digital Realty closed a $3.25 billion hyperscale data center fund

Announced March 30, 2026, this was Digital Realty's inaugural US hyperscale fund — a structural signal that the capital required for AI infrastructure has grown too large for public market equity and corporate debt alone, pushing REITs toward private capital vehicles.

Source: AI Consulting Network →

The power constraint, not location, now drives data center valuations

A facility with 50 megawatts of available power and direct fiber connections to a hyperscaler generates exponentially more value than a larger building in a secondary market with only 10MW and no carrier-neutral interconnection — power capacity has become the dominant valuation driver since 2024.

Source: Data Center REIT Investment Guide →

Traditional real estate's GDP contribution is falling behind the information sector

Real estate value-added in GDP grew just 1.1% in Q1 2026, while the information sector grew 1.5% and hit 3.2% in Q3 2025 — a genuine structural divergence between the two halves of what used to be treated as one "real estate" investment category.

Source: 24/7 Wall St. →

Traditional housing is genuinely tilting toward buyers for the first time in years

Unsold housing inventory hit 1.62 million units at the end of August 2026 — up 5.9% year-over-year and the highest absolute level since November 2019 — while months of supply reached 4.9, the highest reading in more than a decade and a level generally considered a balanced (rather than seller-favoring) market. Nearly 60% of homes are now selling below their original asking price. Median existing sale price actually ticked down slightly to $429,100 in August from $430,700 in July, even though it remains up 1.6% year-over-year — real evidence that price growth is decelerating fast, not just leveling off. The divergence isn't uniform: the Midwest and Northeast (Illinois, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey specifically) are showing real price resilience because their inventory remains well below pre-pandemic norms, insulating those markets even as mortgage rates climb.

Source: Discount Property Investor / NAR data →

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