Here is our September housing snapshot, I wanted to unpack a few numbers. Total listings are down by 30.6% and new listings are only down by 25.1%, how are those two numbers different? We see this play out when there are properties sitting on the market for longer periods of time. During the last few years …
Here are just a few headlines after a quick Google search for “real estate market.” “Feds damage to the housing market may last years” “U.S. facing a ‘perfect storm” for 2008-like housing crisis” Let’s get this out of the way first: the real estate market is slowing. The volume of sales (number of homes) has …
This month, let’s take a moment to review two important graphs and unpack the meaning behind the data. We’ve been hearing a lot about an increase in available inventory, which is true across the board. It’s important to pay attention to the number of new listings. This number has been gently trending up. There are …
Looking at the graphs below, you can see the housing market snapshot for the nation based on May 2022 data. I want to call out two specific charts that tell the “slowing market” story. First, I want you to look closely at the Months Supply chart – it is up, up and away. From a …
Here is a buzzword we haven’t heard in a while: stagflation. Since the term seems to be making its way into recent headlines, I thought I would unpack what it means. Stagflation is a period when prices are rising while the economy is slowing. Normally, you don’t see those two things at the same time. …
There is a signal that has predicted most previous recessions: tens and twos invert. Demand rises for the two year and declines for the 10 year. Normally, the longer I keep your money, the more I have to pay in interest. The two year should always be lower than the 10 year since the government …
Last month we talked about seasonality and how we might need to get past Valentine’s Day to have a good understanding of what was going on in the housing market (February Economic Update). To quickly recap, most markets in the U.S. see a great reduction in inventory going into November and this tends to linger …
On September 20th we saw a really bad day on Wall Street. At one point the Dow Jones was down over 900 points or over 2%. Yikes. So why? The headlines were about Chinese developer Evergrande Group warning about cash flow problems. However, this is too simple of an explanation. There are a few things …
The Fed is starting to talk about tapering, which basically means less propping up of the economy. Since the pandemic hit, the Fed has been doing primarily two things: Lowered the “Fed funds rate” which is the rate for banks when borrowing money from the Fed to lend to people. They’ve lowered it 1.5% and …
When looking at recent data on the residential resale market, I like to pay attention to new home construction, mostly because they have much more control. We don’t actually have any influence on when someone decides to list their home (residential resale numbers), so it can be more difficult to dig out that data. The …