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Just signed a purchase agreement.  Owner had to come down over $100k.  Looks like sales have been slowing in the rural midwest.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-31/is-now-a-good-time-to-buy-a-house-no-not-quite-yet?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&fs=e&s=cl

Maybe a little, or the dude could have really been fishing the market to make a little extra jingle.

41 year old business owning millennial checking in.  

I missed the Gen X cut off by 6 months.  

There are definitely some issues with the cohorts.
Silent Gen guys with no memories of America during WWII and too young for Korea are culturally Boomers.
Late Boomers that grew up and completed their teens with absolutely no chance of being drafted for VN are culturally Xers.
If someone was born in the 80s period, they would have grown up and made it out of HS while network TV was dominant, cell phone ownership was in the minority, home with a computer were in the minority, etc.  And are going to be much more like an Xer.

There are teenagers right now going to school in a town where there is no cable TV, internet sucks, and their cellphone won’t work until they drive about 15 minutes away.  They toss bales of hay in the summer, go hunting, are straight, their parents have been married once for the past 20 years, grandma is still alive five minutes away, they see their aunts, uncles, and cousins a lot.  They have a part time job on the weekend the next town over at the parts counter.   They traditionally have had a very different upbringing than the affluent suburb type next to a big city with a human rights lawyer dad and human rights activist sociology professor mom.

But the schools and media and TV and film are trying to poison them just the same now.

Locked in @ 5%

My house listed yesterday, two showings scheduled today.

April will be the last big push before rates jump even more.  

We are currently between the party being over and the hangover kicking in.  

Here's a trend chart of the US FHFA HPI since its inception.  Reversion to trend would be around 300.  Reversion to the top of variance would be around 250.  Reversion to mean would be, well um, rather nasty (I'm not expecting to see anywhere near that low although anything can happen).

 

If anyone wants to have some fun with economic data check out -

United States FHFA House Price Index

I've been watching the market in the area I purchased for the past several months.  The house was on the market for over six months.  The price I paid was in line with the rest of the market, maybe a little better.

I think realtors are still pushing the "seller's market" line to their clients in a rapidly cooling market.   If the seller would have knocked $50k off the initial price they probably would have sold it over the winter for more money.

Even in 2008 there was no reversion to the mean.  That's not a realistic nor relevant thing.

Socioeconomic upbringing vs a strict age cohort classification would be an interesting topic to discuss over a beer.

If the property didn’t sell for 6 months then only two things possible.

Something seriously wrong with it
Priced way too high.

Coming down from “I LOVE YOU MAN!” to, “Why, Why did I ever…”
AKA the
Drunkover

Hangtoxicated

Unintoxicated,

And

Donetoxicated

That's a bingo.

Houses in the areas I'm looking at are falling in price, I've seen them come down $10k-$20k the past month.

Unfortunately there is still almost no inventory, I can only find 1 way overpriced house I like in the 6-8 cities I'm looking in.

Rates continue to climb though, my most recent pre-approval for 30yr. fixed is 4.89% (up from 3.24% last summer).

Location location location.... a subset of that is "is it the right house for the location".  Such as never buy the biggest home in the hood, it always hardest to sell.  

Funny you say that.  There is another house for sale around the corner from the one I bought.  Both built in the same year (different builders).  Trim around windows is rotting, floors have settled (cracked tile, creaking and popping) and the roof leaked and the interior water damage was half-assed repaired.  Way over priced for the area and the amount of work that would have to be done to it.  I suspect they are hoping to find a sucker that knows nothing about houses to come in with a pocket full of cash to buy it.

And this is one of the biggest fallacies of investing to overcome.  This implies EVERYTHING in the economy is EXACTLY the same at this point in time as it was in 2008.  If that's the case then yes this statement holds true - but we know that's impossible.  

Charting the mean of something and showing the reversion to it is simply a financial concept - not a declaration of certainty so it's always relevant (at least on a chart).  If it wasn't relevant they why did the group who created the chart put it in there  

A statement such as "this kind of reversion requires over a 200 point drop to happen and nothing is trending at this time showing this" then I would say I'm with you.  Which is exactly why I don't see it happening right now - not because something may or may not have happened years ago.

If I had a dollar from every investor who told me they were 100% certain something would / would not happen based solely on what happened / didn't happen in the past and lose I would be sitting on the beach with a drink in my hand waving to the crew of my mega-yacht.

Not exactly, but I understand your point.  My point was more looking at the historical price of housing, and historical bubbles.  It just has never dropped that far.  My point was that event happening is incredibly rare, when you account for the fact that it didn't happen after the biggest housing price bubble/crash we have seen, and has NEVER happened previously to that extent.  That's not a guarantee that it wont.... obviously.

Applying this to investing is not exactly the same.  Individual stocks have massively more volatility than equity sector mutual funds.  Equity sector mutual funds have much more volatility than market indexes.  Market Indexes have much more volatility than housing prices.  The chance of a reversion to the mean in an individual stock is 1000% higher than avg housing prices over such a long term.

How did the powers avoid a reversion to the mean?

Plus the fact that someone brought up rural in the 60s, 70s, 80s had a very dominant local culture without outside influence, in a world with a much less steep technological advancement curve.  With far less fringe cultural input, compared to now.

How does one know it would have reverted to the mean if they did absolutely nothing?

Dang - this is absolutely what I love to see with investors - reasoned thinking and probing questions with no bullshit emotional crying.  This is how you build consistency which in turns build wealth.

@FALARAK you got exactly my point - which I overstated just to make it clearer.

We can't answer these two questions or have any way of knowing so many others.  Stay in the moment and play what you see - not think, know or hope (hopium is a wealth killer like no other).  You fight hard to earn money and build wealth - but you are the only one who can protect it (no one in this world cares more about your money than you do).  Do everything in your power to minimize risk  

QT starts tomorrow

Attached File

Ah hell throw all the charts out the window - Puddin' Pop is meeting with Powell



Biden plots inflation fight with Fed chair as nation worries

Pretty much.

Reference 2008.  Opportunity is knocking. Hard.

Yellen was there too.  I started another thread on it yesterday.

With CPI over 8% officially, the game is not the same.

Dealing with a contract right now where the buyers had an absurd number in their head and already came down $20k for my initial offer. Now that the VA appraisal was done, it’s a $40k discrepancy between accepted offer and appraisal. 4 kids were added to the deed after their mom was put in assisted living and now they want to milk the middle of the forest for all its worth. 1 kid lives next door and the other 3 are out of state/in some liberal shithole city in the same state. Go figure, the kid who lives next door and is the one doing all the work maintaining the house is the one telling them to take my VA-valued offer. The other 3 are being retards because they see their Lilly white suburbia exploding in price and think Midwest-rural forestry commands the same.

About to back out of this deal $1500 in the hole after inspections and appraisals because of a couple greedy fucks.

The market is absolutely slowing down in some areas and all the houses I’ve had saved are seeing 5-20k drops after a month on the market. Compare that to a month ago, houses were contingent within a day if priced properly.

I looked up the background on the FHFA HPI chart and it doesnt appear to factor in inflation.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that may be the missing piece to the puzzle.  I went to the paper with the technical description by Charles Calhoun and did a quick search for inflation and found nothing.  I suspect money printer went brrr as well as additional factors.  I'll even give a concrete example from my direct experience - I sold pretty damn near the top in the last bubble in San Diego.  I did some upgrades along the way (under 10k spent and a lot of sweat equity) but I didnt feel more was necessary given the overall neighborhood.  Flipper hot off a previous success buys it for 3.5x what I paid for ~8 years earlier.  Her contractor just so happened to be married to her agent - they milked her good.  Anyway, she proceeds to drop an easy 6 figures+ on upgrades (marble, travertine, hard wood floors, new driveway, fancy fencing with glass, etc - contractor told me all about it) and 4 years later sells it for 25k more.  Yes it sold for more, but a hell of a lot of money went into turning a 35 year old modest rancher into the palace at Versailles.  This calculation doesnt and cant factor in such things.

The other aspect of that HPI chart is that its on a national basis.  During the last bubble there were many markets that did not participate in the madness or their bubble was much smaller than in coastal CA, Vegas, Boston, Atlanta, etc. - you can see this in some of the Case Shiller charts for places like Portland.  People may not be familiar with the Portland market but it was hot as hell pre-plandemic, I had a big RE agent next to me on a 5hr flight and we talked the whole time about RE.  He cited a stat that at the time over 100 people a day were moving to the Portland area; he was in deep alfalfa.  Not so much now though, with commies and drugged out homeless having taken over.  Anyway, this go around we're seeing places like Boise, Salt Lake City, and Nashville to name a few really booming.  This ocean of liquidity and plandemic induced madness is much more widespread than the last bubble and as a result I would expect the correction to be much more pronounced and widespread than the previous one.

Yellen has to be one of the dumbest fed chairs/treasury secretaries we've ever had.  The rest may have been corrupt AF but they weren't taking the short bus to school.  Reminds me of Birx at the height of the plandemic, just an empty suit.  Just read some of her past quotes, she's clueless and thats being kind.

link?

https://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/2556982_Biden-meeting-with-Powell-Tuesday-Update-Yellen-too.html

If that isn't a bubble....I don't know what is.

Yeah this was released today at the same time as the other report - didn't have enough time before trading started to post it.

    Sellers have tried to keep pushing prices and the buyers would pay it if the interest rates hadn’t gone up.
   Unless the buyer is all cash they look at monthly payment not gross amount.  With rates up less buying power.
Things climbed way to fast I’m glad we are seeing a cool down.

QT starts tomorrow.

The Fed starts Quantitative Tightening (QT) tomorrow.

It will process $47.5 billion a month for the first three months. It will increase to the full $95 billion three months later.

They are trying to reduce their balance sheet by $7.6 trillion by 2023 end.

(Uh, oh).

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) May 31, 2022

You are right - it's not inflation adjusted so it reflects nominal cumulative gains.  This is why it's really important to track multiple indicators and understand the relationships between them.  For this indicator, the FHFA suggests tempering it with CPI data so this is one of the missing puzzle pieces.  Taken together they tell a much better story.  On my economic charts I overlay CPI and Oil prices to help factor in inflation.

And since it's happening!!!

Where’s spidey? Buy the imminent dip?

Wife and I have a planned windfall coming. Couldn’t happen at a better time.

What does QT mean? What should one look to see happening?

Quantitative Tightening. Instead of the Fed buying assets, it will start offloading them.

Attached File

Damn that’s some serious $$$

So the fed's goal is to sell off $7.6 trillion in assets (mortgages, bonds, etc.) over the next 18 months, which per that graph puts it back to what it owned in 2009... not accounting for inflation of course.

Who is going to buy all that?

Contractionary money policy.

Here's a Reader's Digest overview of macroecon: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monetarypolicy.asp#toc-understanding-monetary-policy

Money vacuum go "brrrrrm."

.@SecYellen on inflation being transitory: "I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take. As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy [...] that I, at the time, didn't fully understand." https://t.co/AlrXn4kT0r pic.twitter.com/9tqxo0iA3B

The Hill  (@thehill) June 1, 2022

I’m glad we’re getting the on-the job training finally figured out.

I can understand Oil but CPI is so laughable, not sure what use it has.  Might look at money supply or even margin debt as better proxies of inflation.  

And another anecdote popped into my head after writing about the Portland RE Agent.  One of his dreams was to buy a vacation place in Hawaii.  I told him at the last bottom around 2012-3, there were condos in vacation designated areas (i.e., legal) that were selling for 1/10 the price paid in 2007-8.  Not sure if they had special assessments hanging over them or what but that must have hurt.  Nice area too, swim/surf/fish/spearfish out front often.

Not fully understanding is part of being on Team Biden