Happy Friday! Brian Manning here with the weekly update. Let's get right to it. Let's see. First thing I want to talk about this week is just some information on the housing market and some data that we receive.

So... So, this week we got information from Black Knight, we also got information from CoreLogic, and this is on home appreciation for houses across the country. So... So, right now, CoreLogic says home appreciation was up 8/10th of a percent in the month of February. They expect or they're at 4.4% up on a year-over-year basis. Expectations from CoreLogic going forward is that homes will appreciate at 3.7% on a year-over-year basis.

We also got feedback from the FHFA. This looks at homes across the country with conventional mortgages attached to them. FHFA said homes were up 2/10th of a percent in the month of January, and then, Black Knight came out, and Black Knight said in the month of February, home appreciation was up 2/10th of a percent. This is pretty amazing, definitely. And all the negative media out there about how bad housing is, you look at what's going on in the market and how it's sustaining, and I would say that I'm pretty thrilled to see the numbers that we're getting here.

So, if we look back at the peak in June of 2022, from the peak, Case-Shiller says home prices are down 2.95%, Black Knight says home prices are down 2.6%, FHFA says down 6/10th of a percent, and CoreLogic says they're only down 1.6%. So, you know, in the last ten years, we've had homes appreciate 116%. In the last ten years. In the last two years alone, homes appreciated by 40%. So, if you look at the run up in appreciation and right now, they're only down 2.95%.

But now, we're starting to see momentum back in appreciation in the marketplace, definitely to me, not a housing crash. I truly personally believe that the low in our housing market was in Q4. I think interest rates were at an all-time high there. I think that the consumer confidence was at an all-time low. A lot of people were nervous about what's going to happen.

But now, we definitely still have an imbalance of inventory, supply and demand, interest rates are moving lower. And I'm really wondering if Q4 is the turning point and now we're going to start seeing stronger appreciation going forward. Because if you look at inventory in the marketplace, so in March of this year, there's only 563,000 homes for sale across the country. This is ridiculous.

If you look at pre-Covid levels, on average, pre-Covid levels at the high on an annual basis and high would be like summer months, there's usually about 1.2 to 1.3 million homes for sale. Typically, right now, in the spring, inventory is increasing at about 17% per month. Right now, inventory is only increasing at 12% per month. So, we're not seeing the run up in inventory.

Yes, we're higher than we were, the all-time lows, but we're nowhere near, we're less than 50% of where we were pre-Covid. So, I truly think because of all this, that... Q4 was probably the low in our housing market because... there's an imbalance of supply and demand. Interest rates are moving lower, buyer appetite for housing is increasing. You look at all the reports that are coming out Black Knight, Case-Shiller, FHFA, and we're starting to see home appreciation from the beginning of the year. So, it makes me extremely positive about our marketplace.

Wednesday this week, we got ADP. So, the beginning of every month, the first Wednesday, we get employment report from ADP. The first Friday, we get BLS. So, ADP is the largest provider of private payrolls in the US. For the month of March, ADP said 142,000 jobs were created.

The expectations were that 210,000 jobs would be created. So, that was kind of a miss there. Also, job openings in the month of March fell by 600,000 jobs. This is the lowest in 21 months. Another important data point we got this week was initial jobless claims.

So, every Thursday, we get feedback on initial jobless claims. So, this is people and the prior week that filed for unemployment for the first time, this was at 228,000. The week before that was revised higher by 46,000 people to 246,000. What's important to watch there is when you continue to get week over week initial unemployment claim filings at above 200,000, that's a very high number and it definitely shows continual softening in the employment market. We also look at continual claims. So, continuing claims is at 1.8 million people.

So, continuing claims are people that where the initial filing for unemployment claim haven't found a job and they're still continuing to file for unemployment. So that's at a high number and continuing to grow because when you're adding 200,000 people a week into there, that number grows unfortunately relatively quickly.

Today, first Friday of every month, we get the BLS report. This is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This gives us the government's feedback on employment. Expectations for the month of March was that 240,000 jobs were created. We had 236,000 jobs created. So, pretty close there. Unemployment rate moved from 3.6% to 3.5%. So, that's pretty flat. One important item to note, though, on this report is that leisure and hospitality made up 72,000 of the jobs. The reason why that's important... is because leisure and hospitality has been adding a significant amount of jobs on a month-over-month basis post Covid. Well, right now, we're at 98% of post Covid hiring.

So, that means we're almost back in the leisure and hospitality inventory at an employment level for jobs of where we were before Covid. That's important because in this run up in jobs numbers on a month-over-month basis, we've been seeing lot of jobs added into leisure and hospitality but if that kind of hits its peak right now, that potentially could show softening going forward and not as many jobs being created there as well. I'm around all weekend. If you have any questions, let me know. If you want to go through my strategic buyer consultation, learn how we can help you buy a home in ten days, give me a call. I'd love to help you. Happy Friday. Hope you have a great weekend. Have a great day

-Brian

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