Yes.

The bubble pops when the price growth stops, and goes negative.

‘The bubble’ is basically the idea that prices just keep going up forever.

Based on that idea, financing, loans, leverage happens.

When the fundamentals no longer represent the bubble mindset, everyone whose personal budgets or business relies on prices just going upward, forever, are now margin squeezed, and potentially margin called depending on how overleveraged they are… because you based your ability to pay the debt on your loans you used to purchase the property… on the idea that your property and thus rent prices would just keep going up.

Now, your property is actually worth less, and thus so is the amount of rent you can charge… but your debt payments are still the same.

You hold out as long as you can, but all around you other property owners are cutting their losses and selling at lower property values, which further reinforces the idea that your own property isn’t worth the rent you are charging for it.

EDIT:

There are a lot of underlying fundamentals that drove Zillow’s projection, which are broadly addressed in the article.

But it is also worth mentioning that a single month ago, Zillow was projecting a modest 0.8% growth for the year forward.

Then Trump decided to greatly aggrevate the economic situation, and things downturned so fast that 0.8% growth turned into -1.7%.

The fundamentals have been building up to a breaking point for a while now, huge inventory numbers, much more time on market till a sale, sellers offering many kinds of concessions, significant lossess in the stock prices of major homebuildets…

But then Trump did the Tariff nonsense, and also decided to deport all the brown people to a gulag, cause an overt constitutional crisis, and destroy the USD as the de facto world currency… and in doing all thjs, he essentially popped the bubble himself.

Trumps actions in one month shifted the growth projections for a whole year by -2.5%.