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A Narrative of The Housing Economy

Werewolves Of High-end Housing: You’ve Already Let ‘Em In

Listing Inventory Skewing Much Higher In Price, As Prices Have Surged Over Five Years Portfolios Of Wealthy Skew To Stocks While The Middle Class Skews To Real Estate Wealthy Better Suited For This Economic Cycle Of Real Estate There was a great Wall Street Journal piece (free link) on the decline in availability lower priced Miami home sales. It's the result of a prices rising so quickly and a...

Peanut Butter In Your Chocolate: Commercial Office Mortgage Distress For Office To Resi Conversions

2025 Is Peak Maturity For Commercial Office Mortgages But Subject To "Amend & Extend" Office To Apartment Conversions Are Booming, Bringing Longterm Better News To Tenants Many Of The Cities With Heighten Conversion Activity Also Have Heighten Commercial Office Duress We continue to hear about a commercial office recovery, but that misleading it is coming from commercial leasing brokers which...

Return To Work Mandates Are Just A Flex

The Quits Rate Is Normalizing Suggesting To Some Old Guard CEOs It's Time To End Remote Work NYC Metro Public Transportation Remains Down By Roughly OneThird Indicating WFH Is Entrenched Misuse of Terminology: Most Discussions About Remote Work Are Really About Hybrid Work Lately I've been reading a lot about companies forcing workers to return to the office (RTO) after 5 years of hybrid or...

1 Seaport: When A Developer “Leans” Into Not Paying Their Vendors

Fortis Ghosted My Firm To Avoid Paying For Services Already Rendered Like Owning A Restaurant, Condo Development Is An Unusually Risky Business Avoid Extending Financial Credit To Someone Not On The Hook Personally Well before the Manhattan luxury condo tower 1 Seaport (aka 161 Maiden Lane) topped out (that was in 2018), its superstar sales team of Fredrik Eklund/John Gomes asked me to give a...

Of Tariffs And Mortgage Rates

Tariffs Are Inflationary And Mass Implementation Will Cause Mortgage Rates To Rise 45% Of Americans Don't Know What A Tariff Is The Typical Car Part Crosses The Border 78 Times Apologies in advance for being too wonky today, but you'll have plenty of time to read about tariffs all weekend. A while back, I wrote that from the perspective of a housing market economy hoping for lower mortgage rates...

Do We Need A National MLS?

We Already Have RPR, Realtor.com, And Zillow, That Could Be Quickly Converted Real Estate Is Local, And We Have RESO To Fix Differences In Data Getting 532 MLS Systems To Quietly Go Away Is Like Herding 532 Feral Cats Nope. On Monday, I published a story about the new Compass marketing plan and how open they were about hiding data from buyers using their own words. I've long believed that their...

The New Compass Plan Seems…2-Sided

It is Never Ethical To Hide Information From Homebuyers All Real Estate Brokerages Would Love To Have Both Sides Of A Sale Compass Is Pushing For A Private Network To Control Listings And Recruitment I need to get something off my chest as I watch the "NAR Clear Cooperation" litigation wars play out. Compass is banking on Clear Cooperation being dismantled to set up a private listing network. I...

Manhattan Static Versus Dynamic Housing Insights (Think Reversible Belts)

Manhattan Price Trends And Listing Inventory Slid As Sales Edged Higher. Sales Of Four Or More Bedrooms Experienced The Most Significant Increase. The Slew Of New Ways To Look At Data Doesn't Seem To Keep Most Any More Informed This week, we released our 58page Manhattan Decade Report, a tenyear moving window of annual housing market results of the Big Apple. At each yearly launch, I eventually...

The Spider And The Fly: Don’t Lie About Days On Market

DOM Using The Last Price Change Is Far More Useful Than Using The Original Date DOM Is A More Powerful Metric When Used With Price Or Supply DOM Usually Measures An Accurately Priced Listing In all my published research, I strive to measure Days on Market (DOM) as the number of days between the last price change and the contract date. More than twenty years ago, a Dow Jones Newswire reporter got...

DC Housing Is Not For U.S., By George

DC Doesn't Have Outlandish Political Housing Market Cycles DC Is Experiencing The Shift To Luxury Demand Expected Nationwide There Is An Expectation Of A Wider Wealth Gap In Housing Coming Soon I must confess that I'm not a native New Yorker, but I feel like one after moving there 40 years ago. My teenage years were spent in Bethesda, Maryland, and one of my parent's homes was literally on the D...