so....... good time to wait for the next crash and buy the dip?
There are signs anyone can read about the future, but nobody really knows exactly what they mean or how it will work out. If house prices continue to increase, but at half the rate of inflation: get in now. If house prices go down then wait. Just to make this more difficult, where are you living now: unless you can continue to live rent free in your parent's basement (I'm sure someone reading this is actually doing that), then you need to consider the cost of rent while waiting: even if a house goes down in value, it may still be worthwhile as an investment because most of the payment is coming from rent. Then there is the cost of maintenance which might be significant. There is the cost of moving: if you rent you can break the contract and leave a lot faster than if you have to sell a house in a now bad location first.
If you think I covered even half of the considerations in a couple short paragraphs you are very naive.
The home ownership rate is ~65%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Theoretically, there are close to 30M HH that want to own a home, but don't.
That's close to 100:1.
More practically, probably only a 1/3rd of them are remotely qualified to buy something they'd want to own, and only a 1/3rd probably actually want to own & are currently interested in houses at this price.
That could still be >10 buyers for every house.
That is determined mostly by loan servicing costs to income ratios. What happens when interest rates go up?
Hint: what people can 'afford' changes. And it doesn't get better.
Prices on the market of course won't dip right away, because most sellers don't have to sell right away, and most owners won't have to sell at all. It takes inventory backlogging and houses sitting on the market a few years (usually) before sellers get desperate and start being willing to compete on price. Short sales and foreclosures can force the issue sometimes, but since people REALLY want to avoid those, they also tend to be lagging.
In rich neighborhoods, often the sellers will just pull the listing and wait, both to avoid drops in nearby property values based on comps (neighbors will hate them, and that matters in places like that), and because they have the capital to wait out a downturn and don't want to take the haircut.
The poor/shitty areas though, once the dam breaks it is quite impressive. I've watched it happen a few times now.
This is why real estate is often considered illiquid and hard to value.