7 Comments

1st! LOL. Great read. Inventory has ticked up a bit in Wexford County. More interesting to me is that I put in the 5 months we will be off the boat. Over 100 STRs came up with all 5 months still open. VRBO says that reps 28% of available properties. Likely suspect data. But, to the extent it is even marginally reliable, having 28% of available properties without a single date booked during a 5 month period doesn’t seem good. And the quoted prices for a large % of them are just laughable. One has to wonder, come spring, what % of those are up for sale after a very dark winter. And what % will it take to reset the entire county.

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Thank you. And, yes, one does have to wonder.

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Indeed. It’s just interesting. Realtor shows 317 properties for sale. But if you filter it for just Homes it’s 118. If you include Mobiles it’s 143.

VRBO has at least 400 STR. I didn’t look at AirBNB and I guess I assume there is a lot of cross over. But just taking what I have there are at least 3.4 STR for every actual home for sale. And a decent % of the homes that are for sale you would never buy cause they are not actually liveable. In addition to the STRs there are a “ton” (my kids words) of empty homes that are 2nds. 1/2 of his 30 residential lawn and snow clients don’t live in their properties and to his knowledge, none of them are STR. It’s all shadow inventory. Uncounted. Undocumented. Unknown. 1 county with a total population of 25k.

My view is that it won’t take much of the correct type of nudge (like say a deep stock market correction, or a winter of only 3 weekends booked, etc) before some people will need to sell. And once the need replaces the want, it takes on a life of its own.

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Great read. I live in San Diego. In 2017 we were battling for a SFR in Poway, CA and I put a bid in on house. We could not take a tour..just had to bid. There were 24 offers and 16 all cash... can you say speculation. It's crazy how the Media barely reports on how the investor classes have pushed prices into bubbles. They often say there's not the speculation/house flipping like there was in '06 - '08 so there's no bubble. You'll hear the local realtors claim that there's not enough supply and this type of investor demand is part of normal functioning housing market. On the west coast I reckon there were three types of investors and these are in order from the earliest to the most recent. 1. institutional investors like Blackstone 2. Foreign Investors. Berkshire Hathaway was marketing West Coast properties in China. 3. AirBnB investors. The most tired thing you'll hear from realtors is that the Real Estate Market is local. They often forget that the money and financing is not local, but it is out of state and international.

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Exactly. So many great points. Thank you so much. It all goes together and people cherry-pick their facts. There is so much speculation which created artificial demand, pricing out regular Americans.

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Will the institutional buyers of homes, like Invitation Homes et al, also be "tucking their tails"?

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They have already started and have become net sellers. The recent purchase by Blackstone of the Starwood deal was an "all in the family" deal where Starwood took an $80M write-down in Jan. Will be curious to see that final purchase price adjustment. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2-institutional-giants-went-home-090839982.html

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