Cushman & Wakefield listed a number of critical CRE questions as it looked at the uncertainty that is the opening of 2023. One of them was, "Can households afford today's sky-high rents?" But the answers don't necessarily comport with some other views of the question.

"Home prices have already started to decline, but for the market to return to the historical spread between rents and mortgage payments, home prices would need to fall by more than 25%," the firm noted. "That decline would be more than home prices fell during the Great Financial Crisis (19.8%), insulating apartment demand from further erosion from the single-family market."

So far, that seems largely clear-eyed. Hope that suddenly the prices on houses, even though they are deflating, would crater to that degree is unrealistic. According to government data, the median sale price of houses in the third quarter of 2022 — the most available data at the moment — was $454,900. In the same period of 2019, that figure was $318,400. The price has risen by 42.9%, a phenomenally high percentage. To return to the perception of affordability, and that ignores the increase in mortgage prices, median housing prices would have to collapse by 30%.