(The Epoch Times)—Many people recall the Emmy Award–winning sitcom “The Jeffersons,” whose theme song references George and Weezie “moving on up.” Today, that trend is making a comeback in the luxury market, as “move-up” buyers are entering it for the first time.
Coldwell Banker’s 2025 Mid-Year Global Luxury Report indicates the U.S. luxury home market remains strong, with more buyers whose significant financial gains on the sales of their current homes are pushing them into a new level of home-buying opportunities.
In preparing the report, the national real estate brokerage analyzed luxury market data from 120 U.S. markets and surveyed more than 200 of their luxury-property specialists to identify five current trends shaping this market segment.
“Buyers who once thought luxury was out of reach are now finding themselves in that tier by default,” Michael Altneu, vice president of the Coldwell Banker Global Luxury Program, said in the report.
“They’re coming to the market with significant equity and high expectations, and they’re helping to sustain activity.”
This group includes homeowners who purchased properties five or more years ago and have made significant gains on their real estate investments.
According to Realtor.com, the threshold prices for the luxury home market vary from state to state, with a low of $750,000 in West Virginia, to a high of $5.49 million in New York.
Elena Novak, a lead real estate researcher analyst at PropertyChecker.com, told The Epoch Times that the trend of “move up” buyers is real and growing.
“This is mostly due to record-high home equity, and many are putting their money toward larger homes, often in cash or with very small mortgages,” she said, citing an earlier report by data company ATTOM that notes U.S. home sellers in 2024 made an average profit of $122,500 per sale.
However, Novak cautioned that the housing ladder is getting stuck.
“While these buyers do help free up some mid-range homes, many other homeowners are staying put because they don’t want to give up their low mortgage rates,” she said. “This limits supply for first-time and middle-income buyers.”
Novak believes that the effect of this “move up” trend will be mostly positive for the local economy.
“A move-up buyer means two homes are sold, their old one and the new one [they bought], and that creates more spending, more local jobs, and more tax income,” she said.
She believes the trend is also helping to keep the high-end market healthy, particularly in migration areas like the Sun Belt.
Shaun Michael Lewis, CEO of Clearwater Properties, agrees, adding that the trend is equally as popular in the West.
“Buyers who five years ago might have secured a modest $400,000 house in Bozeman, Montana, are now sitting on perhaps $600,000, $700,000 in equity and can now contemplate the purchase of a home around $1.2 million to $1.5 million in other ‘less hot’ locations where they can get much more home for their money,” he told The Epoch Times.
Nadia Evangelou, senior economist and director at Real Estate Research, told The Epoch Times that the luxury market has been outperforming all other price segments over the past year—in particular, the $1 million-plus tier.
“However, in May 2025, we saw a shift—sales in this segment declined 0.6 percent year over year, marking the first drop in over a year,” she said.
“This softening at the top of the market suggests that broader market dynamics are catching up with high-end buyers.”
Evangelou suggested that the recent stock market volatility could be a possible factor, as it often influences liquidity and buying behavior in the luxury market.
Lewis believes those “moving up” will not only help fuel the tax base, but also the local economy with new luxury homeowners shopping, frequenting restaurants, and hiring specialized services such as landscaping and property management.
On the flip side, the trend is forcing many potential buyers to drive further out from towns like Bozeman to find listings under $400,000.
“This housing shortage also makes it harder for businesses to recruit and keep staff and often forces employers to invent interim housing fixes like temporary lodging,” Lewis said.
While luxury sales remain strong, he contends they’re splitting the market in half.
“Sellers who are selling properties priced above $1 million are still enjoying relatively quick sales, while homes priced from $600,000–900,000 are sitting on the market for longer, “ he said.
Other Luxury Market Trends
More than 68 percent of those surveyed by Coldwell Banker reported that clients are either maintaining or growing their real estate exposure, with another 51 percent reporting an increase in all-cash transactions. The report indicates that clients are also more unlikely to compromise on lifestyle preferences, property conditions, or luxury features.
“Affluent buyers still see real estate as a safe haven to grow and protect their wealth,” Altneu said in a statement. “But as the market balances and more inventory comes online, they can also be more choosy than in recent years.”
Another trend the report found is that real estate remains a cornerstone of wealth strategy, especially during times of economic uncertainty. It maintains that affluent buyers view real estate as safe haven as well as a valuable tool for portfolio diversification.
“Smart Luxury” is a third emerging trend with luxury homebuyers making more practical considerations such as value for price, tax strategy, estate planning, and long-term investment potential. According to the report, these tend to be taking the place of over-the-top amenities or “trophy” locations.
The fourth trend is a wider divide between the ultra-wealthy versus the aspirational buyer. This translates to buyers with a net worth of $1 million to $5 million as opposed to buyers with a net worth of $30 million and above. The report finds those in the $1 million to $5 million range tend to be more cautious and often target homes with renovation potential.
The final trend pertains to cash buyers, with 96 percent of Coldwell’s luxury specialists reporting buyers maintaining or increasing all-cash deals.
“Ultra-high-net-worth individuals are not just buying one property—they’re building real estate portfolio,” Jade Mills, international ambassador of the Coldwell Banker Global Luxury Program said in the report.
“These buyers are paying all cash specifically because they want hard assets independent of market swings.”
The report quotes data from the Institute for Luxury Marketing showing the luxury single-family home inventory has escalated by 19.6 percent and attached property inventory by 14.8 percent compared with 2024. Still, single-family home prices grew by 1.8 percent year over year and 8 percent compared with 2023. Prices for attached properties have advanced even more—by 8.4 percent year over year and 16.5 percent over the past two years.
An April study by the University of California San Diego Rady School of Management found that all cash home buyers have an advantage by paying about 10 percent less than mortgage buyers.
“When sellers accept a mortgage offer, it comes with risk,” Michael Reher, study co-author and assistant professor of finance at the Rady School of Management said in a statement. “There is a risk the deal will fall through because there’s a third-party mortgage lender who needs to approve the loan for the borrower .”
Reher and a colleague conducted the study after they both had experienced mortgage offers to homes being rejected because sellers chose an all-cash offer instead.
A recent Bankrate blog on cash offers weighs both the pros and cons of these types of transactions, noting quicker closing and less red tape when dealing with a lender, but also the possibility of not receiving the highest amount on the deal.
“Ultimately, deciding whether an all-cash offer is right for you will depend on whether you want to sell as fast as possible,” the webpage reported. “If you have time and want to aim for top dollar, you might get a better deal from a buyer who’s financing.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
