Housing Market

Real Estate is a highly “illiquid” asset class ‘most of the time’.  It always has been and always will be.  However, some times, such as now - and from 2003 to 2007 as a prime example - when liquidity is flowing like water, Real Estate’s illiquidity is masked.  Speculators can do no wrong.  Simply having access to short-term or mortgage capital to purchase Real Estate guaranties a double-digit return.  This continues until one day, suddenly, it doesn’t; and, the snap-back to the true, historical illiquid nature of the Real Estate sector happens suddenly and is amplified at first. This creates a snowball effect from which both house supply and illiquidity surge at the same time. Price then becomes the liquidity fulcrum and will drop, relentlessly ripping speculators faces off, until capital begins to view the asset class as a relative value once again.

At the core, a healthy housing market is one where owner-occupied buyers dominate the bulk of home sales. That is simply not the case. This is how you have well paid tech workers in San Francisco cramming into a 2-bedroom apartment like a clown car simply to get by. One thing that is certain from the overall trend is that larger investors are pulling back from the market dramatically.

There's never been a better time to be a home flipper. Not only are average returns at all-time highs (you can double your money in Baltimore), you can even obtain cheap financing from Wall Street as opposed to dealing with pesky local banks. Better still, there's a very good chance you won't have to deal with annoying aspiring homeowners because according to RealtyTrac, the percentage of flipped homes sold to other "investors" is at a four-year high.

As a result of constant jawboning that the PBOC may not only cut rates even more but proceed to launch QE (which it will ultimately, just not for a while), both the Shanghai Composite has been trading at multi-year highs and oil has found a bid strong enough that in the past two months it has surged by some 50% on hopes that Chinese demand will finally come back once the local economy is so weak it leaves the PBOC no other choice. However, two things suggest that the great "reflation" trade is ending.

With the Federal Reserve now indicating that they are "really serious" about raising interest rates, there have come numerous articles and analysis discussing the impact on asset prices. The general thesis, based on averages of historical tendencies, suggests there are still at least three years left to the current business cycle. However, at current levels, the window between a rate hike and recession has likely closed rather markedly.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, anyone who wants the government and Federal Reserve to create a housing recovery, deserves to get it good and hard, like a four by four to the side of their head. Subprime mortgages, subprime auto loans, and subprime student loans driven by preposterously low interest rates are the liquefying foundation of this fake economic recovery. Most rational people would agree that loaning money to people who will eventually default is not a good idea. But it is the underpinning of everything the Fed and government apparatchiks have done to keep this farce going a little while longer. It will not end well – Again.

Nowhere is the new normal more evident than the frenzied hording of so-called "trophy homes" by the world's 1800 billionaires. As Bloomberg reports, the ultra-luxury housing market is scaling new heights as a record number of properties around the world command prices topping $100 million. Demand is growing among affluent Americans and Europeans; billionaires from unstable economies, such as Russia and Middle Eastern countries; and buyers from mainland China, who were barred from investing overseas before 2012. Why - simple (to them?)... "They’re a scarce commodity. And they’re better than gold because you can boast about it."

When student debt and subprime car loans aren't enough, you have to get creative. It now appears Wall Street is set to feed its securitization machine with a new kind of debt: peer-to-peer loans. You read that correctly. Soon enough, the pool of micro loans that are facilitated by sites like LendingClub will be used to create CDOs.

In every inflating bubble, there’s usually two camps. The first group points out various metrics suggesting something is inherently unsustainable, while the second reiterates that this time, it is different. After all, if everyone always agreed on these things, then no one would do the buying to perpetuate the bubble’s expansion. The Canadian housing bubble has been no exception to this, and the war of words is starting to heat up.

The past few years have been a period of relative stability for the U.S. economy.  A lot of people have been lulled into a false sense of security during that time.  These people have become convinced that our problems have been fixed.  But they haven’t been fixed at all.  In fact, our problems are far, far worse than they were just prior to the last financial crisis. Don’t let this next recession take you by surprise.

There are three financial hurricanes hurtling towards our country and most people are oblivious to the coming catastrophe. The time to prepare is now, not when the hurricane warnings are issued.

Following the plunge in new home sales (and surge in existing home sales), pending home sales rose slightly more than expected in March. Up 1.1% MoM (vs +1.0% exp), this is still a slowing in the pace of appreciation from February's upwardly revised 3.6% jump. A 13.4% surge YoY (NSA) has prompted exuberance from NAR as they throw off any vestiges of weather-related problems and proclaims the spring housing market is back (except Northeast saw sales drop 1.5% - for the 4th straight month; and The Midwest fell 2.5% MoM).

In the Common Knowledge Game, fundamentals – whether they are of the stock-picking sort or the macroeconomic sort – don’t matter a whit, and your personal view of those fundamentals matters even less. The only thing that matters is whether or not the QE-works lesson has been absorbed by the learning process of investment professionals, and that’s driven by the lesson’s transformation into common knowledge by Missionaries (like Deutsche Bank's Torsten Slok).

Earlier today the US Census released its latest quarterly data, which confirmed that for what is left of America's middle class, owning a home has become virtually impossible, with the homeownership rate tumbling from 64.0% to 63.7%, which is tied for the lowest historic print since the first quarter of 1986, with the only difference that then the trendline was higher. Now, as can be seen on the chart below, it isn't. At this rate, by the end of the 2015 and certainly by the end of Obama's second term, the US homeownership rate will drop to the lowest in modern US history.

It took a while, but after going nowhere for the past year and in fact declining significantly on a Year over Year basis, the second tech bubble has once again managed to "trickle down" into the San Francisco housing market, which in the month of February saw the west coast tech mecca as the sterling outperformer of all US real estate markets according to the latest Case Shiller data. On the other end: Cleveland was down -1.0%.