U.S. home prices will continue to rise—that is, if President Donald Trump gets his way.
The president addressed housing affordability during a Thursday (Jan. 29) Cabinet meeting in which he reiterated his goal of protecting existing homeowners.
“People that own their homes, we're gonna keep them wealthy,” Trump said in a video shared by journalist Aaron Rupar. “We're gonna keep those prices up. We're not gonna destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn't work very hard can buy a home.”
Trump insisted he was still committed to home affordability but preferred to see interest rates come down rather than home prices.
“We’re gonna make it easier to buy… but I want to protect the people that, for the first time in their lives, feel good about themselves; they feel like they’re wealthy people,” he continued. “There’s so much talk about, ‘Oh, we’re gonna drive housing prices down.’ I don’t wanna drive housing prices down. I wanna drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be sure that’s what’s gonna happen.”
During Thursday’s meeting, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner said December 2025 home sales “rose sharply to their strongest pace in three years.”
According to a newly released report from the National Association of Realtors, December saw a 1.4 percent year-over-year increase in existing home sales, while the median existing-home price was $405,400, marking 0.4 percent year-over-year increase.
Trump celebrated the rise in home values during his keynote speech at the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying he was “very protective of people that already own a house.”
“The house values have gone up tremendously, and these people have become wealthy,” he said on Jan. 21. “They weren’t wealthy, but they became wealthy because of their house. And every time you make it more and more and more affordable for someone to buy a house cheaply, you’re actually hurting the value of those houses, obviously, because the one thing works in tandem with the other.”
Trump also criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to cut interest rates, which would make it easier for Americans to purchase a home.
“We have a terrible chairman right now,” he said. “We should be paying a much lower interest rate than we are. We should be paying the lowest interest rate of any country in the world.”
Powell’s term as Fed chair expires in May. Trump suggested he has already selected his pick for Powell’s replacement, which he intends to announce “sometime next week.”
“It will be a person that will, I think, do a good job,” he said during Thursday’s Cabinet meeting. “We’re paying far too much interest in the Fed. The Fed rate is too high, unacceptably high.”