Home builder commentary from our survey this month was about as negative as I've seen to date. Here's some of the market color that jumped out...
#OklahomaCity builder: "Biggest challenge is your customers who just closed their home and see you drop prices by $30,000."
#Jacksonville builder: "Buying land at the top of the market and having to pull every incentive lever to sell is not a recipe for success. We'll cut starts ~60% to 70% in 2023."
#Boston builder: "October was exceptionally weak."
#Harrisburg builder: "October was the worst sales month in 12 years. No buyers, no sales."
#Birmingham builder: "The market is weakening demonstrably."
#Wilmington builder: "The market is falling off a cliff."
#Phoenix builder: "October started strong, then there was a head fake and in the last two weeks things dramatically worsened."
#Denver builder: "Preparing for a very sluggish 2023 with increasing incentives and price erosion, driven mostly by the need to buy down interest rates."
#Austin builder: "Cancellations spiked again in the second half of October."
#Dallas builder: "Traffic has completely dried up. We're spending considerable dollars keeping backlog in place and closing."
#Houston builder: "Anticipating 2023 being off 40% or more from pre-pandemic 2019, and 2019 was a typical standard year for us." THE END
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C-suite commentary on yesterday’s Tricon Residential earnings call alluded to single-family rental ‘shadow supply’ thesis...
“Starting to see return to normal seasonality in new lease trade-outs and moderation in overall level of rent growth.”
“One of the factors at play could be a higher supply of rental homes that we’re seeing in our markets, which might be caused by would-be home sellers opting to rent out their homes in light of challenging mortgage environment.”
I wrote this piece for @FortuneMagazine yesterday, hoping to shed light on two items possibly weighing down home purchase activity that don’t get all that much attention. The main points were as follows… fortune.com/2022/09/09/spe…
1) A boatload of existing homeowners are locked in and in love with their sub-5% mortgage rate (many sub-3%), most of which tell us they won't purchase again if mortgage rates stay close to today's levels.
2) Existing homeowners also account for about half of all home purchases (almost all of them use a mortgage), so the implied hit to potential home sales is meaningful near-term.
August home builder sentiment and sales/prices/starts survey results are in. Top themes: 1) Home price cuts along with other incentives are helping sales (for now). 2) Supply chain is healing as demand drops and builders quickly slow housing starts. Market commentary to follow…
#Austin builder: “A lot of spec inventory to work through. August was a very poor month for sales across the board. Cancellations spiked from July and buyers showed no sense of urgency.”
#Baltimore builder: “Jumbo loan rates below 5% are helping buyers move forward in that segment.”
Home price trends across 20 top housing markets. Pace of price increases moderating (left chart), which you can see in our underlying home price index flattening out or actually falling in a few markets (right chart). Start it off with #Atlanta.
Apartment transaction market appears to be in price discovery phase. Bid/ask wider as highly leveraged buyers take a breather. Asset values down ~5% to 15% and cap rates up ~50 to 100 basis points based on earnings commentary last week...
Mid-America: “~40 bps change in cap rates last 2 to 3 months. Majority of fallout related to higher levered buyers pulling back & buyers with shorter-term time horizons pulling out of market. Assets not well located or inherent issue could see [cap rates off 75 to 100 bps].”
AvalonBay: “Last couple months there's been a shift in transaction market. Cap rates up 50 bps. Definitely deals not transacting, particularly if they were targeted more to highly levered buyers. In terms of overall asset values, maybe down 5% to 10%.”
Home builder market share dynamics are worth paying attention to as housing demand softens. Couple builders known for resetting the market on price are now lion’s share in many geographies, not just Tampa (shown below).
National home builder market share concentration at the top has grown quite a bit in recent years.
Publicly traded home builders are now 42% of entire new home market, up from 23% in 2001. A lot of this is mergers and acquisitions, but definitely a different market share backdrop.