The house you didn’t buy
Pick the metro. Pick the year you almost bought. See what it became — with the mortgage you didn’t take, the rent you paid instead, and what the down payment would have done in the market.
410 US metro areas · FHFA all-transactions index, 1975→2026 Q1 · every computation on this site is checkable arithmetic.
Start with the famous ones
How it works
1 · The index
FHFA’s all-transactions House Price Index tracks repeat sales on the same homes, per metro, quarterly since 1975. Public data; every number recomputable.
2 · The mortgage you didn’t take
Leverage is the whole story in houses. We amortize a 30-year loan at the actual average rate from your entry year — Freddie Mac’s survey via FRED.
3 · The honest alternatives
The rent you paid instead, grown by the CPI rent index — and what the same down payment did in the S&P 500. Sometimes the house loses. We print that too.
Methodology
Metro house-price trajectories use the FHFA all-transactions House Price Index — quarterly, per metro area, reaching back to 1975 for the earliest markets.
A purchase in year Y is valued at that year’s average index level and scaled to the latest quarter. Mortgage math uses that year’s average 30-year fixed rate (Freddie Mac PMMS via FRED). The rent line grows a reference rent with the CPI rent index; the stock line uses S&P 500 total return.
Limits: an index describes a metro, not your street or your house; condition, remodels, taxes, insurance, maintenance and selling costs are not modeled. Full methodology →