The latest S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Home Price Index, out Tuesday, will offer a sense of what happened with home prices in February.Economists are expecting that home prices rose slightly year over year, though the housing market is currently pretty weak. That’s been the trend for a while now: prices trending up, even though demand is sluggish. Which is unusual.In a typical year, the housing market should be taking off right about now.“We'd see a lot of listing activity get going in February and into early March, and the buyers would be coming in the second half of March and into April,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS.But that’s in a normal year. “Which we really haven't had in a while, to be quite frank with you,” she said.Instead, not much is going on right now, though more sellers have been listing.“It’s still not clear that the buyers are out there yet,” Sturtevant said.Some of that is the affordability issue that’s been around since the pandemic. Mortgage rates and home prices are both still high.Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, said some of it is also because of political and economic uncertainty. The war in the Middle East, tariffs, and fears around what AI could do to the job market are holding prospective buyers back. “We have about 600,000 more sellers than buyers nationwide,” she said. “Normally, when you have that gap between the number of sellers and the number of buyers, prices come down to get those homes sold.”But that isn’t happening. Home prices have continued to rise in much of the country.“In order for prices to come down, you need to have sellers who are pretty much desperate to sell. That's what we saw during the foreclosure crisis,” Fairweather said. “But this time around, homeowners are in a very secure position. They have lots of equity in their homes.”That means they don’t have to sell if they don’t want to, and can hold out for more money. Along with the fact that there’s just not enough building going on in many markets, that’s helped keep prices rising.But Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said they’re rising much more slowly now than they were a couple of years ago.“Right now, we’re seeing house prices are growing low single digits, basically, less than inflation,” he said. “And so while we say that house prices haven't fallen, they are falling in real terms after we account for inflation.”If that trend continues and mortgage rates come down, he said they’ll eventually get back to a place where home prices are more affordable.