Don't Buy A Home Until You See This Market Report

Michael Zuber (0:00)

Folks, he's back. The man, myth, the legend, the person with the most housing data, data, data. Mr. Lance Lambert from Resy Club. How you doing, sir?

Lance Lambert (0:09)

Housing, housing, housing. Always so much going on, especially right now.

Michael Zuber (0:13)

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. Well, we're gonna hit three topics today. Number one, we're gonna hit price. We're gonna find out where home prices are absolutely crashing and where they are not. We will also talk about a very exciting builder report that you did, really highlighting who is buying and what kind of credit quality might these individuals be. And then finally, we will talk about Warren Buffett and his significant commitment to new home builders, but we will save that for last. But Lance, let's remind folks who you are and what you do, because maybe they're new to the channel. The channel is growing a lot recently. So who is Lance Lambert to begin with?

Lance Lambert (0:49)

Yeah, long time financial data journalist who had gotten into housing data back in like 2017, getting close to 10 years now.

When I left Bloomberg to go work at realtor.com, during that time, I was taking all these different data science courses, trying to get out of media and go into data science. And I was using a lot of the data at realtor.com to do all of my courses on the side. I would do my 40 hours there and then 20, 30 hours in the evening working on using their data with these courses. And I learned a lot about housing. And then I leave to go to Fortune magazine, get back a little bit more into traditional media.

The pandemic housing boom takes off. There's a real need for a better understanding of the housing reporting. Everything was very national, very lagged with the Kay Schiller reporting, although I'm a huge fan. And I feel like every year I'm getting a little bit stronger in terms of getting a little bit more nuanced and trying to help people to better understand what's going on in the housing market.

Michael Zuber (1:51)

Well, yeah, you've been a huge addition to the channel. We started this way back when you went to Fortune. We've been going on this for three or four years now.

And my audience loves you because, again, I have opinions, I make calls, and you are just raw data. So we really do ham it up sometimes. So the audience really appreciates you. And we're gonna give you a sample of that right off the bat. We're gonna talk about where housing is crashing and where it is not. And again, Lance is just gonna give us the data, and then we're gonna poke at it a little bit. So you want me to share the screen?

Lance Lambert (2:20)

Yeah, go for it.

Michael Zuber (2:21)

There we go.

Lance Lambert (2:22)

So this is the first chart. This is showing year over year shift in house prices.

The national appreciation is pretty close to zero. And we have a good number of markets that are kind of like a little bit below zero and a little bit above. So I wouldn't say there's too many that are kind of like full blown flash crashing. Flash crashing to me is like when you have like a nominal decline of like seven, six, eight percent, 10% a year, right? We did have a little bit of that last year in Florida.

The intensity though, while it's still soft and still weak in a lot of pockets of Florida and going through a correction, it's not in the flash crash zone. And so a stock for a flash crash would probably be like 20 plus percent, right? Or more. Housing moves very slow. So even at a six, seven, eight percent drop or 10, that's quite a bit for one year for housing.

Michael Zuber (3:15)

No, absolutely.

Lance Lambert (3:16)

Right now, what we're seeing in the market is, and here you'll see some darker red and some Eastern Kentucky markets. They really had had a big run up last year. And so it's just a kind of a quick blow off there of some of their big run up there. But the more noticeable ones to me are the, still Southwest Florida is still fairly weak.

It's around Dallas in particular, and Northern Dallas and some of these suburbs that had had a lot of home construction. They had a lot of people, international migration, H1B visas, that's really tapered off. Austin is still an epicenter of weakness in the housing market. They had had a really big run up during the pandemic period, around 70% during the pandemic housing boom appreciation. And the other ones here that are more notable are good amount of softness around Colorado and the Denver market area, especially new construction, especially condos in particular.