Rob Hahn From The Real Deal: With home values surging, American homeowners are tapping their equity at a rate not seen since before the Great Recession. Homeowners tapped a combined $80 billion in equity through cash-out refinancing in the fourth quarter of last year, according to mortgage data provider Black Knight — the highest amount in any … Read more
This topic likely deserves far more detailed treatment. But I thought I’d park a couple of thoughts here, maybe to be revisited in the future. Wall Street Journal points out that “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock.” I was getting ready to put on my doomsayer robes … Read more
This is going to be a long and personal post. If you’re more interested in analysis of real estate companies, identifying major trends affecting housing, or explanation of things like web3 and real estate… go ahead and skip this one. This one is for me and maybe, just maybe, for a few of you who … Read more
With the news that the West (particularly the US) has banned Russia and Russian banks from the SWIFT system, it seems fairly obvious that Russia got orangepilled hard. Blockworks has a post up about how Russia thought it had $600 billion in foreign reserves… until it didn’t. And a lot of rich Russians thought they … Read more
CoreLogic released January home price numbers and… well… crypto ain’t the only thing going to the moon: Home prices nationwide, including distressed sales, increased year over year by 19.1% in January 2022 compared with January 2021. On a month-over-month basis, home prices increased by 1.4% in January 2022 compared with December 2021 (revisions with public … Read more
As most of you know, I used to do in-depth updates for each of the publicly traded companies in the residential real estate sector. Since I’m not an investment analyst, my interest was always on what the public information these companies had to disclose signifies for the real estate industry as a whole. I still … Read more
From Attom: Total mortgages drop at fastest pace in three years Banks and other lenders issued 3,266,907 residential mortgages in the fourth quarter of 2021. That was down 10.7 percent from 3,656,892 in third quarter of 2021 and down 13.5 percent from 3,775,894 in the fourth quarter of 2020. The quarterly and annual declines were … Read more
Opendoor reported its Q4 and full year 2021 earnings last Thursday, and I needed to take some time to think through things. Long story short, Opendoor blew the doors wide open with its performance. It has replaced Redfin as the most important company in residential real estate, and it’s on the heels of Zillow to … Read more
A look at some recent data showing housing is becoming more and more unaffordable for the average American buyer, why that might be, and why it is not transitory or cyclical. I explore topics from macro analyst Luke Gromen, look at investor purchase data, and then touch on the one thing that could collapse home … Read more