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A Narrative of The Housing Economy

Tariffs Tantrums Are Getting More Pushback Than Donut Holes

Goldman Sachs Now Sees Three Fed Cuts Later This Year Recession Odds Are Rising Quite A Bit In Back Half Of Year Mortgage Rates Could Slide More As Economy Receives Blunt Force Tariff Trauma As I’ve mentioned here before, tariffs are inflationary, and that’s not a political statement. However, you can see in the chart below that the use of tariffs is significantly higher in Trump II than in Trump...

Let’s Talk About The Weather Since Home Sales Are Augmented

US Monthly Signed Contract Increased Year Over Year The Midwest, Savaged By The Polar Vortex In January, Fought Back In February NAR Seems To Have A Supercharged Spellchecker Although still weak, more contracts were signed in February than the month before after adjusting for seasonality. In the NAR Pending Home Sales press release, it said "Pending home sales in February augmented 2.0%.” This...

Bonus Comp Can Buy A Lot Of Housing Happiness

Wall Street Profits And Average Bonus Per Employee Comp Reached New Highs NYC Remains A Key Driver Of Higher End Housing Demand Wall Street Comp In NYC Is Almost 5X The Private Sector The New York State Comptroller released their annual report on Wall Street profits and average bonus compensation for 2024. It showed the sector made a lot of money [gift link], the most on record in terms of...

But Whatever: Fannie Mae Blacklists And Arrogance

The GSEs May Be Sold To Help Pay For A Tax Cut For The Wealthy Housing Is Local But Mortgage Rates Are National Privatizing The GSEs Supposedly Determine Whether Doing So Will Raise Rates One of the housing related promises coming out of Washington D.C. has been to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (governmentsponsored entities/GSEs), often described by my peers as a couple of big dumb banks...

Canada’s Housing Market: Take Off ‘Eh”

Canadian Housing Prices Have Increased 3X US Housing Prices Over The Decade Canadian Mortgages Tend To Have Adjustable Rates, Making Consumers More Vulnerable To Inflation The Canadian Government Tracks Housing Prices, Only New Construction Tracked In US My mom was born in Montreal, and she immigrated to Connecticut when she was 13, so I've always felt an affinity towards Canada. When the...

First Lets Kill All The Lawyers

Law School Enrollment Surging A Reliable Indicator Of Rapid Economic Deterioration Consumers Think The Economy Is Breaking Quickly Trade War SaberRattling Is Tanking The Economy Before you judge me, hold on a second! The economy is weakening rapidly, and layoffs are surging as the US pushes trade wars against all our longterm allies. Then I thought about one of my dad’s favorite sayings from a...

Rental Is Mental But Hurts Like Dental

NYC Rentals Are Setting New Price Records As Mortgage Rates Remain Stuck Manhattan Is Not A Leading Indicator For The US Housing Market Multifamily Sales Are Expected To Go Big In 2025 Back in college, I remember reading a story about the first lead singer for Van Halen getting into a bar fight, saying his adversary’s problem was “more dental than mental.” I applied the literary flex to today's...

Will Redfin Finally Become A Rocketship?

Redfin Snapped Up By Rocket Mortgage Becoming A Notable Threat To Zillow Redfin, The Discount Real Estate Broker, Never Figured Out How To Be Profitable Rocket Has Always Seemed To Defy Interest Rate Gravity And Redfin Has Great Tech Wow. Today is the birthday of the World Wide Web. No one saw the acquisition of Redfin by Rocket Mortgage coming, and perhaps that's what makes this transaction so...

Boomers Are #Winning In The Affordability Crisis

Most Existing Homeowners Have A Low GoingIn Cost Basis And Are Paying Their Bills Tariffs Are A Policy Blunder That Will End Up Pushing Up The Cost Of Housing After All The Job Loss Expected From Tariffs, Mortgage Rates Will Probably Fall There’s a great article by Scott Galloway, a prolific book author and podcaster, on the crisis in housing. I’m a big fan of his Pivot Podcast with Kara Swisher...

Housing Notes Reaches Its Tenth Anniversary While DC Is A Gray Area.

Time Really Flies When You Write A Newsletter It's Been A Decade?!?!?!? WaPo Tracked DC Homes By Paint Color To Correlate With Gentrification Trends Like Exterior Paint Color Trends, We've Seen Plenty Of Emphasis On Interior Color Schemes On March 6, 2015, I sat down to write a newsletter different from my Matrix Blog after I grew tired of writing up to 5 blog posts a day since 2005. Housing...