Happy Friday! Brian Manning here with your weekly update. Let’s get right to it. Let’s see. Monday this week we had such a negative media from CNBC about the housing market and how it’s so bad and how appreciation is down.

And, you know, we’ve talked about this. So, yes, appreciation is going to moderate. Appreciation went from 19% to 17%. That’s normal. We’re going to see this happen. We’ve been talking about this in the past. Certainly, seeing a little bit of cooling is just fine. The market we just came out of was not sustainable. Again, you got to watch the negativity of the media because they make it sound horrible. But really 17% appreciation is pretty ridiculous.

We also got some feedback on builder supply. If you look at the window from 2017 to 2019… So, leading into COVID right now, builder supply is actually down by more than half. It’s actually down by 54%. So, if you look at what’s available for new construction prior to what we had before going into the pandemic, we’re definitely seeing the numbers down there, which is going to be considered tight supply and that’s going to help appreciation as well.

Also, if you look at what was under contract and that window from 2007 to 2019, before the pandemic, 25% were under contract and right now 51% are under contract. So, builder supply down under contract for builders down, you know, still going to put up the fight for solid appreciation, but of course, we’re going to see it moderate.

Tuesday this week, we got CoreLogic. So, CoreLogic gives us feedback on home appreciation. This was for the month of June. On a month-over-month basis, it was up 6/10th of a person. On a year-over-year basis, it went from 20% down to 18%. Still very robust numbers, still very strong. But like I’ve already said, you’re going to see appreciation moderate. So, I’m not shocked to see it come down from 20% to 18%. I think where we’re heading with this is going to be a solid mid single digit appreciation for a little while. That’s pretty phenomenal if we get to that and it just kind of remains that You know, this doesn’t mean that the housing market is crashing. This does not mean that there’s just pure turmoil in the housing market. It just means that things are calming down, which they absolutely have to do.

So, this is a little bit of cooling appreciation there. It’s not surprising. Wednesday, we had Fed presidents on parade. It’s kind of funny to hear that and talk. You listen to a lot of them and there’s still going to be more monetary tightening coming in, which just means additional Fed rate hikes. All of them said they think they can orchestrate a soft landing. I think that they’re just blinded by what’s going on right now. And certainly, none of them seem to have paid attention to what history has proven to show us. Because every single time we’ve gone through monetary tightening like this, every time we’ve had Fed rate hikes has never been a soft landing. So… we’ll have to wait and see what happens. But I can’t say I’m a pure believer of what they’re saying there.

Thursday, we got initial jobless claims. So, initial jobless claims shows us how many people each week are newly filing for unemployment claims. This number was up by 6000 people. And this number has kind of just been slowly increasing and increasing and increasing on a monthly basis. I’m sorry, on a weekly basis. So, you know, the Federal Reserve, for example, they look at what’s called a lagging indicator. So, they’re looking at employment numbers from the month before, but we’re really watching what is the current rate for new unemployment filings.

And then we’re also really forward looking as well, because forward looking is going to give us a lot more feedback as to the recessionary pressures that we’re seeing. So, for example, if we look at new job openings in the month of June, new job openings declined. They went from 11.3 million down to 10.7. We saw for round numbers about a $600,000 decline in new job openings. And then in the last three months, we’ve had a 1.2 million decline in job openings.

So, we’re definitely seeing some softening in the labor market there. I wouldn’t say we’re buying textbook in a recession right now because textbook recession would be negative GDP for two quarters in a row, plus the softening labor market. But perhaps, if we keep an eye on new unemployment filing claims and we keep a good eye on job openings, that will be the leading indicator and kind of the canaries in the coal mine of where we’re heading as far as the economy is concerned. I’m around all weekend. If you have any questions, let me know. If you want to get pre-approved, give me a call. If you want to go through our strategic buyer consultation, call me on my cell phone, text me. I’d love to help you in any way I can. Happy Friday. Have a great day.

-Brian Manning
303-500-3839
brianm@rate.com