Over two years in, this decade has already brought a global pandemic, record-setting inflation, rising interest rates and a country more divided than ever before.

So why not a housing crash too?

Americans who lived through the 2008 crisis may be watching the red-hot market starting to cool and getting flashbacks. And for prospective homeowners, it might be appealing to put your plans on pause until the market bottoms out so you can snag a house at a great price.

But experts say there are good reasons to believe that however this shakes out, it won’t be a return to 2008 — which will no doubt be a relief to anyone whose apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur have been long put away in storage.

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1. Lenders stopped being so lax

Blame it on the banks. A huge contributor to the housing crisis in 2008 was dicey lending practices within the financial industry. Years of deregulation made it easier — and more profitable — to hand out risky loans.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed into law in 2010 aimed to prevent that by increasing oversight in the industry.

While the act’s effectiveness has been called into question over the years, it has undoubtedly forced lenders to be stricter about their lending practices, which means far fewer borrowers are likely to land in hot water.

The median credit score of newly originated mortgages was 773 in the second quarter of the year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And 65% of new borrowers had credit scores of 760 or more.

The median is down from a series high the quarter before, but the Fed added in its quarterly analysis that, “credit scores on newly originated mortgages remain very high and reflect continuing high lending standards.”

2. Homeowners are doing fine

The onset of the pandemic could have been catastrophic for the housing market if millions of homeowners had no choice but to default on their loans.