Free Republic

After two years of strong demand and soaring prices, the supply of rentals in the Hamptons is surging, leading to a wave of last-minute price cuts. Median rental prices in the first quarter fell 26%, according to Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel. Brokers say some owners are slashing prices by 30% or more just to fill their properties. “There is a tremendous amount of inventory and people are not renting it,” said Enzo Morabito of Douglas Elliman. “And it’s across all segments, from the very low to the very top of the market.” The weakness marks a dramatic and...

Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi is ready to call it. He tells Fortune that we've officially moved from a housing boom into a "housing correction." The real estate data rolling in for April and May shows that the U.S. housing market is softening. New home sales fell 19% to their lowest level since April 2020. Redfin reports 19% of home listings cut their price over the past month. Inventory is rising fast, while mortgage applications and existing home sales are also falling. This drop-off isn't a result of seasonality, or a soft month or two. Zandi says it's a...

Alarm! US pending homes sales in April tanked -11.5% YoY and down -3.9% MoM which was greater than expected. Not really surprising when you see that REAL home prices are growing at an 11.55% YoY clip while REAL hourly earnings are declining at a -2.8% YoY pace. Do you feel like I do with Bidenflation crushing my check book and The Fed crushing my hopes for an affordable home.

The numbers keep getting worse. The University of Michigan Consumer Survey showed a decline in May to 58.4 (100 is baseline). Soaring inflation is a likely culprit. But the truly horrible survey result is the UMich Buying Conditions for Houses, plunging to 45. The reason? Crazy, expensive house prices courtesy of The Federal Reserve and rising mortgages (also, courtesy of The Federal Reserve). The buying conditions for houses is now the lowest in the history of the University of Michigan consumer survey. In fact, consumer sentiment for housing is far lower than during the awful housing bubble burst of 2008...

Joe Biden and others on the left believe increasing the inventory of houses Americans can afford requires putting more residences in already existing neighborhoods, including changing zoning laws to allow multiple units on single-family home lots. Biden also wants fewer people driving cars, which fits the leftist narrative that to achieve social justice and save the planet, people should live in dense, mixed-income neighborhoods, and use public transportation.

"[BLM Global Network] received an infusion of $66.5 million from its fiscal sponsor — an intermediary commonly used by fledgling nonprofits to process donations. Two weeks later, a man named Dyane Pascall purchased the seven-bedroom house that would become known as Campus. According to California business-registration documents, Pascall is the financial manager for Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, an LLC run by Cullors and her spouse, Janaya Khan; Pascall is also the chief financial officer for Trap Heals, a nonprofit led by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’s only child. "Within a week, Pascall transferred ownership of the house to an...

US Existing Home Sales were 5.61M SAAR in April, down -2.4% from March’s -3.0% MoM reading. But median prices YoY for existing home sales printed at 14.85%, still hot, hot, hot. With 3 consecutive declines in MoM existing home sales, how can prices still be raging at 14.85%? First, inventory for sale in April remains low compared to 2010 (yellow line). Second, The Federal Reserve’s Stimulypto (excessive monetary easing) is still out there in force despite Jerome “Slowhand” Powell signaling rate increases (green line). 30Y mortgage rates are still rising. Where do we go from here? 30 year mortgage rates...

The first real-estate transaction using bitcoin in Louisville, Kentucky was recently completed. The purchase took about eight seconds and cost $0.70 in transaction fees. The owner and president of Millennial Title Company believes bitcoin will be used in real estate transactions more often in the near future. Louisville, Kentucky made local history with its first real estate purchase made in bitcoin which only took about eight seconds, according to a report from The Courier Journal.

As The Federal Reserve seems hellbent on raising interest rates to fight the rapid increases caused by Biden’s follicies, we see the S&P 500 index taking a hit in 2022, but NAREIT’s all equity index as well. An example of how a REIT can be impacted by The Fed is the Industrial REIT index that tanked with Amazon’s declining earnings prospects. While industrial REITs is a broad category, Amazon’s crashing EPS has certainly shocked the market. Retail REITs? How about Simon Properties? Simon Properties, a large mall REIT, go “Fauci’d” as the Covid economic shutdown really caused pain for shopping...

I received an interesting letter in the mail today. The letter is from one of those "quickie" land buyers who prey on the ignorant people. I bought a lot which is in a subdivision on Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas side 34 years ago. The letter offers me $250 for the residential lot. Does anyone have a creative way to respond to this guy to send the message of "Don't ever do that again!"? I wanted to post the redacted letter to Facebook, but don't know if that is legal or not. Words escape me on how people can...

The housing and mortgage markets are addicted to gov. MarketWatch had an interesting piece on mortgages entitled “Here’s how much a 40-year mortgage would save you each month vs. a 30-year loan. And the ultimate cost.” To make a long story short, a 40-year mortgage, by stretching the payment out from 30 to 40 years, means that the mortgage mortgage payment declines from $1,687 to $1,504. But with The Fed planning on taking away the monetary punchbowl, mortgage rates are rising making housing even more unaffordable. But most things are not equal. The 40-year mortgage results in a slower paydown...

Even in the face of rising mortgage rates and stagnating construction numbers, the housing market is still scorching hot. Because of this, it may be difficult to believe that more than 16 million homes across the U.S. are sitting vacant. But this doesn’t mean millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are withering away in the suburbs. Vacant homes can be unoccupied for many reasons beyond being uninhabitable. For example, a house can be vacant because it’s still on the market to be sold or rented or it’s a vacation home not currently in use. Regardless of why homes are vacant,...

Applications for mortgages are dropping as mortgage interest rates keep rising while home sellers are lowering their prices as additional supply hits the market, according to multiple reports.The interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($647,200 or less) was 4.90 percent in the week ending April 1, up from 4.80 percent a week ago, an April 6 news release by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) stated.Rates for those with loan balances greater than $647,200 rose to 4.51 percent from 4.40 percent while 30-year fixed mortgages backed by the FHA saw interest rates rise from 4.66 percent to...

Biden-linked Lobbyist Bought Property from Biden’s Bro, Gave Him Mtg Loan in 2005 <><>Lobbyist got two Federal Emergency Mgmt Agency govt contracts worth $5.8M in 2010. <><> Lobbyist was decade-long Senate staffer for Joe Biden Financial records reviewed by Politico show that Joe Biden’s brother James sold one of his three parcels of land in the U.S. Virgin Islands at a substantial profit to a well-connected lobbyist who then extended a mortgage to James on the remaining two parcels. In May 2005, James Biden purchased an acre of land on Water Island for $150,000. He then applied for and received...

Rental prices for single-family homes have skyrocketed to record levels across the U.S., increasing to an average of 7.8 percent in 2021. Apartment rents are up too. “Of the markets in our analysis, 97.7 percent recorded price increases for one-bedrooms and all markets saw increases for two-bedrooms [100 percent],” the report, issued last month, said. “Nationwide rent prices have increased significantly year-over-year. One- and two-bedroom rents were up 24.4 percent and 21.8 percent, respectively.”

This clip from the Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep film “Death Becomes Her” perfectly represents the predicament surrounding The Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policies and housing prices: “Now a warning” after Meryl Streep ingests The Fed’s magic monetary elixir. The Dallas Federal Reserve issued a warning recently that a housing bubble is brewing … after the economy drank its magic monetary elixir. We can see the housing bubble clearly (defined as the spread between REAL home price growth and REAL average hourly earnings). Notice that the current housing bubble looks similar to the infamous 2005 housing bubble. And the US...

Across the country, corporate landlords are expanding manufactured housing portfolios and driving up rents, pushing longtime residents out. GOLDEN, Colo. — When Sarah Clement moved to the Golden Hills mobile home park two years ago, she felt like she had won the lottery. After years of squeezing into one-bedroom apartments with her, her 7-year-old son finally settled into his own bedroom, his toys splayed out in the yard and his school just at the edge of the park. Ms. Clement loved the friendliness of her neighbors and getting to watch the sun rise over the scrubby mesa to her east...

Managing China's real estate market involves a precarious balancing act. Getting it wrong could be costly, says a Chinese economist.Despite strong global economic headwinds, not least from the COVID-19 pandemic, China managed to achieve 8.1 per cent GDP growth last year, its highest rate in a decade. With that, China met the International Monetary Fund’s expectations and far surpassed its own government’s 6 per cent target. But China’s economic performance is not quite as strong as it may seem, and not only because year-on-year growth figures were flattered by the pandemic-induced trough in 2020 when the growth rate slowed sharply...

After 8 years in the Bay Area, web designer Mike Rothermel, who’s in his mid-40s, his wife and 9 year-old daughter realized their time in the tech capital had expired. Fed up with the Bay Area’s high prices and harder lifestyle, Rothermel craved the ease of life and lower costs in Boulder, where he’d grown up. “Everything costs less and people are less competitive. You don’t have to make more than your neighbor or drive a better car. We don’t feel that pressure here,” says Rothermel of Boulder.

"Investigative journalists doing their jobs should dig deep, into Pelosi's role in the controversial, $280-million, federal-funded Hunters Point Shipyard affair - in relation to her alleged role as an investor in a real estate investment called PRESIDIO PARTNERS. Look past the fact that the 936-acre site, of which about 443 acres are not polluted - Hunter Point is the largest tract of undeveloped land in San Francisco. Roll Call stated that in early 2004, Murtha “reportedly leaned on U.S. Navy officials to sign a contract to transfer the Hunters Point Shipyard to the City of San Francisco” and that “Laurence...