467: Navigating Awful Housing Affordability - Rick Sharga Joins Keith

The Fed can raise interest rates, but they cannot create housing supply. 

Housing intelligence analyst Rick Sharga joins us for the second week in a row.

This housing market is awful for primary residence homebuyers. But at GRE Marketplace, you can still buy income properties with rates as low as 4.75%.

Rick tells us that the most prosperous markets now favor the: Midwest and Southeast, single-family homes, rental property investors with buy-and-hold strategies.

National home prices are appreciating modestly. Home sales volume is still down.

Investors now account for more than one-quarter of property purchases.

Mortgage delinquencies are near an all-time low.

Rick and I discuss why this market is so bad for flippers. 

High homeowner equity positions ($300K+) support this housing market. 

Timestamps:

The impact of rising mortgage rates [00:02:37]

Discussion on how the Federal Reserve's raising of short-term rates has caused mortgage rates to go up, affecting the housing market.

The affordability challenge [00:03:38]

Exploration of the impact of higher mortgage rates on homebuyers, particularly first-time buyers, and the decrease in affordability.

Low supply of homes [00:08:48]

Analysis of the low inventory of homes for sale, with a decrease of 9% from the previous year and 47% from 2019, leading to a challenging market.

The mortgage rate lock in effect [00:11:05]

Discussion on how the mortgage rate lock in effect can crimp demand but cannot create supply.

Hottest markets in the Midwest and Southeast [00:11:05]

Analysis of the hottest real estate markets in the Midwest and Southeast regions of the United States.

Positive turn in home price appreciation [00:13:06]

Explanation of how home price appreciation went down but has recently turned positive again.

Housing Permits, Starts, and Construction [00:21:24]

Discussion on the trends and levels of housing permits, starts, and construction, and the need for builders to increase production.

Investor Activity in the Residential Market [00:22:28]

Exploration of the percentage of home purchases made by investors, with a focus on small and medium-sized investors and the misconception of institutional investors dominating the market.

Delinquencies and Foreclosures [00:24:36]

Analysis of mortgage delinquency rates, foreclosure activity, and homeowner equity, highlighting the low delinquency rates, the presence of equity in foreclosed homes, and the importance of early-stage foreclosure sales.

The future direction of rents [00:32:00]

Discussion on the potential upward pressure on rents due to low affordability and high homeownership rate.

Inventory coming to the market [00:33:03]

Exploration of the impact of expensive inventory coming to the market and its effect on rent prices.

The overall economy and housing market [00:34:03]

Consideration of the possibility of a recession, unemployment spike, and foreclosures affecting the housing market.

The coach's role in finding real estate deals [00:43:06]

Explanation of how an investment coach can help you find the best real estate deals in the marketplace.

Advantages of buying properties from marketplace [00:44:20]

Reasons why buying properties from marketplace can lead to good deals, including lower prices and absence of emotional seller involvement.

Resources mentioned:

Show Notes:

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CJPatrick.com

Rick Sharga on X (Twitter):

@RickSharga

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(00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Hold a terrific discussion today on the direction of the housing market, including lessons that you can learn for all time plummeting home sales volume and direly low home inventory. Why home price appreciation is taking place now. Could the government soon penalize you for owning too many rental properties? What's the best place for a real estate investor to position themselves in this era? And more today on Get Rich Education.

 

(00:00:33) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get rich education.

 

(00:00:56) - Walking from Horseheads, New York to Nags Head, North Carolina, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold. And you're listening. To get rich education, you are going to get a fantastic market update today. And along the way, you'll also learn lessons if you're consuming this 5 or 10 years from now. Our expert guest was with us last week to discuss the economy. This week, it's episode two of two as we discuss the real estate market.

 

(00:01:25) - He has been the executive VP of markets at some of America's leading housing intelligence firms, and today he's the founder and CEO of Patrick Company, either a market intelligence firm for the real estate and mortgage markets. And he has 20 plus years of experience in those industries. It's the return of Rick Saga Part two of two. It's not imperative that you listen to last week's Part one of two that we can help you see the big picture. Enjoy this long, unbroken interview and then after the break, I'll come back to close it. Just you and I. We're talking with Rick Sagar, expert housing analyst, previously. We talked about the general condition of the economy. And now Rick and I are going to break down the housing market with what's happening there. There's so definitively connected. Keith One of the things to that the Federal Reserve has done by raising those short term rates is caused mortgage rates to go up, right? Mortgage rates tend to run loosely in line with the yields on the ten year US Treasury bonds that we talked about at the end of the first segment.

 

(00:02:37) - Those are now up around 4%. And typically a 30 year fixed rate mortgage will be between one and a half and two percentage points higher than that yield. So in a normal market, we'd be looking at a mortgage rate today of about five and a half to 6%. Instead because of the risk and the volatility that the market is pricing in because they're not sure what the Federal Reserve is going to do next. We're looking at mortgage rates for a 30 year fixed rate loan of over 7%. The most recent numbers from last week from Freddie Mac, we were at almost 7.2% on that average, 30 year fixed rate loan and 6.5% on a 15 year fixed rate loan. You and I were talking before the show and and you know, historically speaking, if we keep these things in context, we're still actually below the 25 year average, which was 8%. But we have a whole generation of homebuyers who've come of age during the period of the lowest mortgage rates in the history of the country. They got spoiled, they got spoiled.

 

(00:03:38) - And to be clear, it's one of the reasons that home prices rose as rapidly as they did and got as high as they are is because you could afford to make monthly payments with a two and a half, three, 3.5% mortgage. Now, you still have home prices about as high as they were then, and you have a mortgage rate that's doubled. And for most home buyers, particularly first time home buyers that make your monthly mortgage payment was going to go up by 45 to 60%. And most of us didn't get that 45 to 60% raise last year. It really had a huge impact on affordability. In fact, this is such an unusual occurrence that according to Freddie Mac, it's the only time in US history when mortgage rates doubled during a calendar year and they didn't just double in a calendar year. Keith They doubled in the space in a few months. It was that kind of systemic shock to the system that really hit the housing market as hard as it did. Right. And they've also nearly tripled in a pretty short period of time.

 

(00:04:35) - Yeah, they really have. And again, going back historically speaking and and get this from Gen Z folks and millennials, when I talk about, you know, the old days of mortgage and I do remember my first mortgage had two numbers to the left of the decimal point. I forget if it was 11 or 12%, but it was something like that. And they basically say, okay, Boomer, but that 11% mortgage was on your $70,000 house, Right. And not, you know, today's median priced home of $430,000 or whatever it is. So it's a fair point. Mortgage rates are not high, historically speaking, but that monthly cost, because of the combination of home prices and higher interest rates, is choking some people and making affordability a problem. And because of that, one of the forward looking metrics that I take a look at is the purchase loan mortgage application index from the Mortgage Bankers Association. So this is the number of people that are applying for loans with the purpose of buying a house.

 

(00:05:35) - They're off almost 30% on a year over year basis right now. You can see without straining your eyes at all the impact that these higher mortgage rates are having on the housing market. And we had almost record numbers of purchase loan applications from the time people who are allowed out of their house during the pandemic until these mortgage rates doubled from 2020 through the early part of 2022, mortgage rates were in the threes and fours and sometimes even in the twos. Yeah, everyone wants to talk about mortgage rates and it is an important discussion to have here at Marketplace with our investment coaches. Rick Some builders, as you know, they commonly offer rate buy down incentives to buyers of new homes. And what some of our providers are doing here, Rick, is we have one builder where if you use their preferred lender, they're buying down your income property's mortgage rate to 5.75%. And we have another builder where if you use their preferred lender, they're still buying down your mortgage rate to 4.75%. And of course, with Non-owner occupied property here, you know, previously you had talked about mortgage rates in excess of seven.

 

(00:06:47) - They might normally be about 8% for non owner occupied property, but you're able to buy them down to five and three quarters or even four and three quarters with one of our providers for new builds right now, that's a great deal and your listener should really be taking advantage of those opportunities. We'll get into new homes in a few minutes and what we're seeing builders do for consumers, But have to tell you, those numbers are better deals than consumers are getting right now. And you're being generous when you're talking about private lending rates right now. Most of the lenders I'm familiar with are nine, ten, 11%, depending on the nature of your investment. So your folks are getting a great deal with those rates. We talked about purchase loan applications. The other advanced predictor I look at is pending home sales. These are people that are entering into contracts. The deal hasn't been closed yet. Has it been recorded yet? This comes out from the National Association of Realtors. And those numbers are down on a year over year basis as well.

 

(00:07:42) - There's a lot of rate sensitivity in the market, though, Keith. And if you go back to March when rates went down just a fraction of a percent, we saw more purchase loan applications. We saw more pending home sales. But as rates have climbed back up over seven, we've seen both of these metrics go down. Yeah. So we're talking about pending home sales. We're talking about sales volume that's down in this discussion, not sales price. And anyone might be hard to say, but when you see sales volume that's down, including pending sales, how often is that due to worse affordability and how often is that due to low supply of homes? Why don't we jump right into that? Keith That's a great segue. And this is a very difficult time in the housing market because it has both of the factors that you just mentioned, two very difficult headwinds for the market to try and overcome. And and we'll get into details on both of those in just a minute. Because of that, existing home sales were down in July and they were down pretty significantly on a year over year basis, about 16%.

 

(00:08:48) - And that's the 23rd consecutive month where existing home sales were lower than they were the prior year. January was the lowest month of sales this month, and it broke a streak we started this year. I was forecasting that we'd see between 4.3 and 4.4 existing home sales. That's down from about 5.2 last year in about 6.1 million the year before. Right now, we're trending at a little over 4 million existing home sales for the year. So even my relatively low forecast for the year may have been overly optimistic. You mentioned inventory and inventory is a huge headwind for the market. Inventory of homes for sale today is down about 9% from where it was a year ago. It's down 47% from where we were in 2019, which was probably the last normal year we've had in the housing market. In a normal year, we would be looking at about a six month supply of homes available for sale. That's what economists or housing market analysts will look at as a balanced market balance between supply and demand. We're at about two and a half months supply right now nationally and in many states it's much lower than that.

 

(00:09:56) - So there's just not much out here. And the only reason the inventory number looks as good as it looks and it doesn't look very good is because it's taking a little longer to sell properties once they hit the market. If you were looking at new listing data, it's even worse. There's very little inventory coming to market in the way of new listings, and that's because of the rate increases we talked about a minute ago. 90% of borrowers with a mortgage have an interest rate on that mortgage of 6% or less. 70% have an interest rate of 4% or less. If you're sitting on a mortgage rate of 3.5% and you sell your house and buy a house at the same exact price with a 7% mortgage, you've just doubled your monthly mortgage payment. It's not that people psychologically don't want to trade a low rate for a high rate. There's a financial penalty for them doing so. And until we see mortgage rates come down a bit, probably into the fives, we're just not going to see a lot of inventory coming to market except for homeowners who need to sell or have so much equity and maybe you're going to downsize into a smaller property that they don't care about that kind of shift.

 

(00:11:05) - Yeah, that is the mortgage rate lock in effect. Perfectly explain. And the Fed with the raising rates, they can crimp demand. But one thing that the Fed cannot do is create supply. As much as you might like to see Jerome Powell in work boots with a nail gun, that just doesn't happen. There's an image for you, for your listeners. Yeah, and I'm not sure I'd want to. I'd want to live in that house. That's not Chairman Powell building, but inspection. Yeah. Good economist. Maybe not a carpenter. We were talking about this a little bit earlier, too. And if you're an investor, this is probably worth noting, whether you're a fix and flip investor or investor who's buying properties to rent out a lot of the interest. This is from the sharing some data from Realtor.com and they've taken a look at where people are searching for properties and where transactions are taking place and they're finding that Midwest Southeast are really the hottest markets, places that are a little off the beaten path, you know, places in New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine and Ohio and Wisconsin.

 

(00:12:06) - But interestingly, some of the markets that had been suffering a little bit, they're starting to see a little more interest in whether it's California, but off the coast or markets in Colorado or Washington state. But clearly, a lot of the activity, a lot of the money is moving into the Midwest, in southeast. That's right. With the work from anywhere trend, you might see this small flattening and not as much of a disparity in home prices between markets. You're certainly still going to see that, but that can just help create a mild flattening when it doesn't matter where you live anymore and you can go ahead and purchase in lower cost markets. Yeah, and what I'm sharing now is national home prices, home price. And I'm glad you mentioned what you just did, Keith, because the fact of the matter is this has been a very localized correction. And if you're in San Francisco or San Jose, if you're in Seattle, if you're in Austin, if you're in Phoenix, you're in markets where prices are off 10% or more from peak.

 

(00:13:06) - If you're in Boise, Idaho, you're off more than 10% from peak of Boise had oil prices go up by 47% in a single year, a year or so ago. So he just overshot the mark. One of the reasons the national numbers don't show more volatility is because of what Keith just mentioned. It's because people are trading in where they are in a high price, high tax state moving into a lower price state and candidly outbidding local buyers and probably overpaying a little bit for those properties. So you're seeing home prices go up in some of those less expensive markets much more rapidly than they would under normal circumstances. And what we're talking about here is national home prices that are appreciating at a modest rate now. Yeah, and they are. So if you look at whether you're looking at the Case-Shiller index, it gets published monthly or the National Association of Realtors data. We saw home price appreciation start to go down last year. It was still positive but going down and that was true until pretty much the end of the first quarter this year when the data went negative for the first time in years.

 

(00:14:15) - So we were seeing on both a month over month and year over year basis home prices go down and that happened until June, June, things flatlined in July. Prices actually went up ah, year over year. So if you're looking at the median home price compared to the peak price a year ago, it's actually up about 1% from where we were last year, which is kind of amazing. The Case-Shiller index is a little bit of a lagging indicator and it rolls three months together, but it also started to turn the corner with its July report. So after almost a full year of price appreciation coming down and prices in decline, we've seen both of these indexes turn and are starting to go positive. It does show you that there continues to be demand for properties that are brought to market. And while home price appreciation certainly isn't soaring by any means, it's back in positive territory now. And that's something that a lot of people hadn't predicted this year. When the supply of homes is this low, it keeps generating a few bids for any available home.

 

(00:15:21) - Now, not as many bids as it did back in 2021. But besides generating bids, you have these huge population cohorts of millennials and Gen Zers that are growing, and they're in their prime homebuyer years moving through the system to go ahead and place those bids and keep just modest home price appreciation here lately. That's sort of how I see it. Rick If you want to add any color or thoughts to that, I think you're spot on. Keith It's the largest cohort of young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 in US history. That's prime age for forming a household. 33 to 34 is the average age of a first time buyer right now. And so these people would like to buy a house. And for people who are investing in single family rental properties in particular, at least short term, the affordability issue is something that definitely works in your favor. If somebody was looking to buy a house, they might prefer to rent a house rather than rent an apartment. I've read research that shows somewhere between 20 and 30% of people who had planned to buy have decided to rent for the next year or two while market conditions settle down or while they can put aside more money for a down payment.

 

(00:16:27) - These market conditions are playing in favor of people who have rental properties to offer. One other metric I'd like to share in terms of home prices, Keith is the FHFa puts out its own index. FHFa is the government entity that controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So these are your conventional bread and butter, vanilla kind of 30 year fixed rate loans. If you look at their portfolio, home prices are actually up 3.1% year over year. And every sector of the country is showing positive rice appreciation except for the Pacific states and the mountain states. And those are some of the markets we talked about earlier. And even those are very close to breaking even at this point. So HFA breaks it into about ten regions, nine of those ten currently appreciating year over year. Yep, something like that important for you to know again as an investor as to what's happening in your region. Again, whether you're you're planning to sell the property or rent it out. You talked about what builders are doing for your investor folks.

 

(00:17:28) - Yeah, we're seeing new home sales actually improving to consumers as well for a lot of the same reasons, incentives. So a lot of builders are coming to the closing table with cash. They're paying points on mortgages and getting those rates down where they're short term or long term. They're offering discounts, they're offering upgrades to properties. And so new home sales are still down, but just slightly on a year over year basis and have actually been beating last year's numbers for the last four months. My original estimate for new home sales this year was about 600,000. I think we're going to probably coming closer to 675,000 this year. And the only reason we won't sell more is because the builders aren't building that fast enough. But one of the reasons people are buying these new homes is because that's what's on the market today. People would have bought an existing home, can't find one. Here's the other factor. New home prices are down 16.4% from last year's peak. Now, this is informative. Think this would surprise a lot of people? Well, it surprises me.

 

(00:18:28) - It should surprise people because new home prices almost always go up, right? This does not mean builders are discounting homes 16.4%. What's happening is they are building less expensive homes, They're less expensive per square foot, and they're building smaller homes. And they're doing that in acknowledgement of the higher cost of financing. That also, by the way, is in sending people to look at these properties as either a starter home or a minor move up kind of property. But it is one of the reasons why new home sales are doing better than existing home sales right now on a percentage basis. That's an interesting number, Rick. A few weeks ago, I shared with our newsletter audience that builders are building homes smaller and closer together, which might be reflected in lower prices, but just didn't think it would be 16.4% lower from peak. Now, if you're doing year over year, it's probably not that big of a drop, but from the peak price we are off. And it is to your point, it's a pretty significant number.

 

(00:19:26) - It would be a problematic number if it was the existing home market, right, because then you'd be looking at the same property being worth 16% less. But a builder can kind of play with those numbers a little bit. Single family housing starts after falling for quite a while, are now back going back up only slightly from where they were a year ago, but they are moving in the right direction. Multifamily starts have actually tailed off a little bit after reaching record high numbers. There could be as many as a million apartment units coming to market this year. Yeah, which would be an all time record. So we've seen building on those multifamily units slow down a little bit. If you look at at new home starts for single family properties still below where they were a year ago. But again, for the first time in quite a few months, starting to trend up. A couple of things to share with your viewers here, Keith. In terms of construction, we're seeing construction continue to grow in the multifamily market because of all the starts we saw previously.

 

(00:20:23) - We are seeing single family construction slowed down, but that's because the builders are working their way through a glut of homes that was under construction. So we had a really weird happenstance about a year ago, a little over year, we had the highest number of homes under construction ever. And this data goes back to the early 1970s, and we had the lowest number of completed properties available for sale ever. And a lot of that was due to supply chain delays and to labor shortages. And over the last year to 15 months, the builders have gradually begun working through this glut of homes that were started but not finished. And we've seen the number of completed homes go up a little bit, almost back to normal levels, not quite there. One of the reasons they're not quite there is people are buying these homes before they're completed. They're working with the builder. Buying a home is it's almost ready to go, but still under construction. What's been encouraging, looking into the future is that permitting has increased a bit over the last two quarters.

 

(00:21:24) - We know builders are betting on the future. They're not necessarily breaking ground on all these properties they have permits for because they don't want to oversaturate either. And they're being very judicious with their building because they got caught with a ton of inventory during the Great Recession that they wound up selling at fire sale prices. But the trends are long term, looking like they're going in the right direction right now for new homes. So to help the viewer and listeners chronologically, we're talking about housing permits followed by housing starts. And then finally, housing construction. Right? Permits are up, starts are up recently, but down year over year. And the construction numbers are getting back close to normal levels. And we need the builders to build more because even before the rate lock effect took effect and existing home inventory got so scarce we didn't have enough housing in the works, we were depending on whose numbers you believe, somewhere between 2 and 6 million units short. We need the builders to come back to market. Note for your folks.

 

(00:22:28) - Keith Investors continue to account for a fairly significant amount of activity in the residential market. Over a quarter of home purchases 26% in June, which is the most recent data we have, were made by investors and believe this number actually under reports the number of investor purchases because it's from a company called CoreLogic, it's accurate data for what they count, but they only count investor purchases where the buying entity has an LLC and LP Corp kind of entity. And we know that a lot of buyers don't do that who are investors. So it probably understates it. But the fact of the matter is that historically speaking, 26% of residential purchases being done by investors is pretty high number. That's a pretty high number and as you alluded to, is probably actually higher than 26% of home purchases being made by investors. And so the headlines will breathlessly tell you that Main Street is being gobbled up by Wall Street. Oh, I know. And those institutional investors are evil people. They're buying everything that the truth is is completely the opposite.

 

(00:23:31) - If you look at investors who are buying properties, it's really the small investors who are buying about 46% of those investor purchases and medium sized investors about 35%. If you're looking at the biggest of the big investors, they're buying less than 10% of what's going out today. And they still own collectively about 3% of the single family rental stock. It's the mom and pop investor who continues to drive the market. Yeah, I'm glad you bring this up, Rick, because there seems to be this outsized perception that institutional money through someone like, say, in Invitation homes is just gobbling up all the good investor homes. And and they're really not. It's mom and pop investors that rule. In fact, there's some legislation pending in D.C. right now that's aimed to keep these institutional investors from doing what they're already not doing and have some tax penalties for anybody who owns. Here's the number that's important. More than 50 properties well, Invitation Homes owns significantly more than 50 properties. I know a lot of medium sized investors who own more than 50 properties.

 

(00:24:36) - Yeah, they're certainly not institutional investors. They certainly don't have a hedge fund behind them. Important again, for folks in this market to be in touch with their legislators and let them know what's really going on in the marketplace so we don't get this kind of bad legislation. It makes it tough for the average investor to really take full advantage of the opportunities that are out there. 100%. Mom and pop investors might need more than 50 units to obtain financial freedom. Yep. Just to wrap up, Keith, a couple of points on delinquencies and foreclosures. I know a lot of investors got into the business, you know, a decade or so ago and there was just a rash of foreclosure activity and you could buy a distressed property by just walking down the street and knocking on doors. It's a little different these days because of that strong economy we talked about earlier. In that low unemployment rate. Mortgage delinquencies are at an all time low. Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the midpoint of this year, at the end of the second quarter, the total delinquency rate was 3.37%.

 

(00:25:36) - To put that in context, historically the number is somewhere between 4 and 5%. So not only are we not seeing a lot of delinquencies, we're seeing less than we would see normally as seriously delinquent loans. The ones that are 90 days plus past due is as low as we've seen it in probably the last 6 or 7 years. That's really interesting. So not very many homeowners are in trouble with making their payments, which to some people might seem like a conflict with what we described back in the earlier part of the chat about low savings and higher credit card debt. So many of these homeowners are locked in to these really low payments where they got low mortgage interest rates. Plus inflation cannot touch those fixed rate payments. And that's an important point for those people that are in these homes. It would be more expensive for them to go rent right now, probably because they got such a good deal on the mortgage rate. There's usually a pretty strong correlation between unemployment rates and mortgage delinquency rates. So I mentioned that the most recent report had unemployment at 3.8%.

 

(00:26:37) - I think at the end of June it was a 3.5%. So we might see delinquency rates tick up a little bit. There was also some really bad social media memeing going on during the government's mortgage forbearance program. There was even an economist who predicted that almost everybody who got a forbearance was going to go into default and that would have been a catastrophe. If you look back a little over a year ago, actually more like two years ago when there was there were a lot of people in forbearance. You saw delinquency rates very high, but that was because people were allowed to miss payments. They were just being counted by the industry as delinquent. The fact is that less than a half of a percent, less than one half of 1% of the borrowers who were in forbearance and there were 8.5 million of them have defaulted on their loans. The overwhelming majority have done very, very well with that program. So it really didn't contribute to any kind of delinquency or default activity. So strong economy, extremely high, low quality because lenders really haven't been making many risky loans since the Great Recession.

 

(00:27:40) - The record amount of of homeowner equity that's out there. Yeah. Is keeping this market pretty solid to the point where foreclosure activity today is still running at a little bit less than 60% of pre-pandemic levels. So in a normal market, about 1 to 1.5% of loans are in some state of foreclosure. In today's market, it's about a half a percent. So we're just not seeing much go into foreclosure and the properties that go into foreclosure. The homeowners have a significant amount of equity. 92% of borrowers in foreclosure have equity in their homes, which is wildly different from where we were during the great financial crisis, when a third of all homeowners were underwater on their loans. At just about everybody in foreclosure was upside down. And people push back at me when I'm out talking at conferences about this. Keith Oh, yeah, they have equity, but they don't have enough equity to make a difference. Oh, yes, they do. 88% of the borrowers in foreclosure have more than 20% equity. That's typically the magic number that a realtor will tell you you need in order to sell your property and avoid any other kind of complications with one of these foreclosures, preventing any sort of fire sale and lowering of prices that makes all home prices go down in a neighborhood where not anywhere near that.

 

(00:28:57) - No, not at all. And in fact, some other data that I'll share with you and your listeners is that about 62% of the distressed property sales we see right now are properties in the early stage of foreclosure prior to the foreclosure auction, which means these distressed homeowners are protecting their equity by selling the property before it gets sold at a foreclosure sale. And so they're protecting the vast amount of this equity. But if you're an investor in today's market, there's some really important information in what I just gave you. You can't wait for the bank repossession. In this cycle, bank repossessions are running 70% below where they were prior to the pandemic, so there's fewer properties getting to auction because 67% of these distressed property sales are prior to the auction. Properties that get to auction are selling through at about 60% rate. So there's nothing going back to the lenders. So if you want to buy a property in some stage of foreclosure, your best bet in today's market is to get a list of people in the early stages of foreclosure and reach out directly to them.

 

(00:30:01) - Your second best bet is to get to that foreclosure auction. Be ready to move at the auction, and your worst bet is to wait for the lender to repossess the property. And in fact, I've seen anecdotal data that suggests that those properties are actually more expensive than the ones you could buy from the homeowner or at the auction because the lenders are fixing them up and selling them at full market price. Good guidance for those chasing distressed properties. So that's what's going on in the foreclosure market. I don't see foreclosure activity being back to normal levels until sometime next year. And I don't see activity bank repossessions being back to normal levels even next year. It's a very different marketplace. This is what I was just talking about. Keith If you were to break up what selling and what stage of the foreclosure process right now, about 64% of distressed sales are taking place prior to the foreclosure auction and less than 20%. Distressed sales today are those background properties. So it's a very different world than what a lot of investors grew up in.

 

(00:31:03) - Rick is about to share his summary with us, his closing thoughts. Before he does that, I've got two questions for you, Rick. I hear some people out there, it seems to be oftentimes the real estate agent type, maybe that's trying to be a big cheerleader for the market. And I hear a few of them say something like, hey, you know what? You better buy now, because when mortgage rates fall, home prices are really going to shoot through the roof. I don't really know that that necessarily happens because when mortgage rates fall, okay, that might increase demand of capable homebuyers, but it should also increase supply. Now, the mortgage rate lock in effect, goes away and more people will want to bring supply onto the market. And I also like to think about what happens when rates are falling. Typically, that means the economy needs help and unemployment might be a little higher. So my thoughts, Rick, are if mortgage rates do fall substantially, that might help home price appreciation a little bit, but I don't see it as any sure thing that that would make home prices go through the roof.

 

(00:32:00) - What are your thoughts? It's a great question. You make a very logical argument. A lot of it comes down to supply. And that's where I would hedge my bets. I don't think we see a ton of supply come back to market until rates are back in the low fives. So there's a point and a half of interest going from little over seven to maybe 5.5%, where we're probably going to see more buyers come to market than we're going to see inventory come to the market. My other thought we touched on it earlier is with rents. Talk to me about the future direction of rents. They were horribly hot a year or two ago, up 15% year over year. Rents have moderated substantially. But with this really lousy home affordability and a high homeownership rate, it seems like with this low affordability, we're set up for the homeownership rate to go lower in the proportion that rent go higher, which could put upward pressure on rents over time here. What are your thoughts with rents? Yeah, offsetting what you just said is a record number of apartment units coming to market this year.

 

(00:33:03) - There are likely to be some markets across the country that wind up oversupplied because of the amount of inventory coming to market. Now, don't get me wrong, the inventory coming to market is going to tend to be expensive inventory. And so that in and of itself could make rent prices come up a bit. I do believe in the short term I would tend to agree with you that the lack of housing stock available for people who would like to buy is going to play in the benefit of the folks who own properties to rent. And that will, I believe, be particularly true for people that own single family residential units that are like houses to rent. I guess we're going to split the difference on these two questions. I'm going to mostly agree with you on the second one. I do believe there's a chance prices will go up a little bit more than you think as mortgage rates come down until we get down to about 5.5%, mortgage rates are lower when we see more of that inventory coming to market. And what is the real wild card in all of this, of course, is what happens with the overall economy.

 

(00:34:03) - Do we enter a recession? Does unemployment spike? If that's the case, that should weaken, demand a bit and you could have a little bit of an uptick in foreclosures, which will weaken the market as well. So a lot of different components at play. And I think what people ask you questions like that, Keith, about, you know, mortgage rates come down, is this going to happen? They kind of oversimplify the equation quite a bit. There are a lot of other variables that go into it. 100%. Why don't you go ahead and share your closing thoughts with us? A lot of stuff we covered, so I won't dwell on too much of this very long. But from my perspective, a recession is still a real possibility. Probably not until next year if we have one. And if we do, it's likely to be pretty mild and fairly short and we shouldn't see a huge, huge spike in unemployment. I do believe that as the Fed decides it's done raising the Fed funds rate and announces that we'll see mortgage rates gradually decline back toward 6% by the end of this year.

 

(00:34:57) - And we'll be back in the fives next year. And by the way, historically, every time the Fed has stopped raising the Fed funds rate, we have seen mortgage rates come back down. Existing home sales right now are on pace for their lowest number since 2009. Likely, we're going to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.2 million existing home sales. But we're likely to see more new home sales than a lot of people had forecast beginning of this year, maybe 650, 675,000 of those sales in 2023. And we've seen prices decline in the new home market, but they might have bottomed out in the existing home market because of the supply and demand thing that Keith and I have kind of beaten to death during this podcast. Again, importantly for this audience, investors continue to account for a very large percentage of residential purchases and a lot of you seem to be shifting toward buy and hold strategies, which again makes ultimately good sense in a market like today's. And then that anticipated wave of foreclosures that all those folks on YouTube were trying to sell you courses to figure out how to maximize never materialized.

 

(00:35:57) - And at least during this cycle, not likely to any time soon. Probably won't. Yes, A lot of people a couple of years ago, especially on YouTube, were talking about a certain price collapse is coming and it never happened. And I never saw how it would have happened and I never made those sort of dire predictions. Well, Rick, this was a great chat about the overall economy, the housing market and what investors need with the housing market. I'm sure our audience learned an awful lot. It was a terrific update. If our audience wants to learn more about you and kind of wish this chat would just go on and they could learn more about you and engage with your resources. What's the best way for them to do that? Well, you can certainly follow me on social media. I refuse to say my Twitter handle is just Rick Saga. I'm on LinkedIn to hard to find there. You can also check out my website which is Patrick. Com. Enjoy doing these conversations with you Keith.

 

(00:36:51) - Think the first time we talked you reached out because I had come down like the wrath of God on somebody who was predicting a housing price crash because I didn't see one coming either and thought he was doing investors a disservice. So keep the faith and keep the good fight going. Keith And I'll be here whenever you want to talk. Jerry Listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They have provided our tribe with more loans than anyone there truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four Plex's. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though, even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. Com. You know, I'll just tell you for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with freedom family investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. Returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%.

 

(00:38:00) - Their minimums are as low as 25. K. You don't even need to be accredited. For some of them, it's all backed by real estate and I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains in your W-2, jobs, income. And they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 668660. And this isn't a solicitation If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to six six, eight six, six. Hi, this is Russell Gray, co-host of the Real Estate Guy's radio show. And you're listening to Get Rich Education with Keith Reinhold. Don't Quit Your Day dream. Yeah, terrific insight from Rick, as usual. It's remarkable how much this interview is aligned with what we're doing here. As Rick discussed how, though, it's a tough environment for homebuyers, it's better for investors, especially for single family rentals and especially in the Midwest and South are core areas.

 

(00:39:23) - It's a better market for the buy and hold investor than it is for flippers. It's a tough chase for flippers. Sometimes you don't flip the house, the house flips you. There are still so few homeowners in delinquency and foreclosure. Rick believes that when lower mortgage rates come, home, prices could appreciate more than I tend to think. We'll see how that turns out. And, you know, historically here, as we talk about the direction of home prices and the direction of rent growth Now with respect to home prices, when I provided you with the home price appreciation forecast, I keep somewhat undershooting. The market appreciation tends to outperform what I think by just a bit. Back in 2018, 2019, home price appreciation rates, they were just kind of bumping along at 4 or 5%. Back then, interest rates were super low, housing supply was more balanced. And I said right here on this show then about five years ago, that I don't see what will make home price growth like really accelerate or shoot up from here.

 

(00:40:32) - Well, then we had the pandemic, something that no one saw coming when the pandemic fog cleared. You remember that all here on the show in late 2021, I forecast 9 to 10% home price appreciation for the coming year, which back then I was talking about 2022. And then that appreciation rate for 2022 came in at 10.2%. Although I was close, I shot just a touch low. Now at the end of 2022, well, about nine months ago, I predicted zero home price appreciation for this year. As we near the fourth quarter, it looks like we'll get low single digit appreciation, but that remains to be seen. However, I've long been undershooting the market just a bit, though. Close and mortgage rates. No, don't even ask me. I don't try I don't make mortgage forecast. That is too hard to do. Making a mortgage rate prediction is almost like a certain way to be wrong. Although Rick and I talked about how this is a good market for investors, to my point from last week, in some markets, cash flow has become an endangered species with some of these increasing expenses for investors.

 

(00:41:46) - And again, I have some really good news for you here. We have largely solved that problem here at Gray of higher mortgage rates, hurting your cash flow. And that's why investors like you are still snapping up rental properties from Marketplace right now because of the strength of our marketplace network and relationships. Here we have a new build provider offering a mortgage rate to investors of 5.75%. Yes, they will see that your rate is bought down to 5.75%. In today's environment, another new build investment property provider is offering a rate buy down to 4.75%. Yes, you heard THAtrillionIGHT? And we have another builder provider where our investment coaches have been sharing with you a 2.99% seller financing option. There is more to it than that. And these builders, though they are in business to move property. So take advantage of it where you can. And besides buying down your mortgage rate for you like that, some are even waiving their property management fee for you for the first year. In addition to buying down the rate. I don't know how long all that's going to last, so this can be a really good time for you to contact your in investment coach.

 

(00:43:06) - Your coach will help you shop the marketplace properties, tell you where the real deals are and tell you how to get those improbably low mortgage rates for income properties. Today, your coach guides you and makes it easy for you If you don't have an investment coach yet, just go to Marketplace. Com slash coach and they're there to help you out. And marketplace properties they are often less expensive than elsewhere in addition to the low rates from some of the providers. But now you might wonder why often are the prices not always, but often, why are they lower? Well, first of all, investor advantage markets just intrinsically have lower prices than the national median. And secondly, there is no real estate agent to compensate with the traditional 6% commission, you are buying more directly. Thirdly, these property providers, they are not. And pop flippers that provide investors like you and other people where they just flip like one home a year instead. These are builders and renovation and management companies in business to do this at scale so they get to buy their materials in bulk, keeping the price lower for you.

 

(00:44:20) - And another reason that you tend to find good deals at Marketplace is that you aren't buying properties from owner occupants where their emotions get involved and they get irrational over there on the seller side. So you can go ahead and get started with off market deals at GRI, marketplace.com. If you'd like the free coaching from our investment coaches, then contact your coach. And if you don't have one yet again you can do that straight at GRI marketplace.com/coach that's an action item for you this week that your future self should thank you for until next week. I'm your host Keith Winfield. Don't quit your day dream.

 

(00:45:04) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.

 

(00:45:32) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building get rich education.