National Home Bidding-War Rate Collapses To Decade Low

A new Redfin report specifies that only 10% of all offers written by Redfin agents on behalf of their homebuying clients faced a bidding war in October, down from 39% the same time last year and now at a 10-year low. Not even a plunge in mortgage rates this year could attract new buyers.

Three of the top metropolitan area for bidding wars in October were located in California -- San Francisco (34.8%), San Jose (20.5%), and San Diego (15.6%). On the East Coast, most of the bidding wars across major cities were non-existent, except for Philadelphia (13.8%).



The rate of bidding wars across major metro areas in California have collapsed in the last 12 to 16 months.

For example, 50% to 85% of all Redfin transactions in San Francisco from 2017 through 2Q18 faced fierce competition among buyers. But as soon as summer rolled around, demand plunged, and so did the bids, as the bidding war rate crashed to near zero by 1Q19 -- but has since bounced back to 34.8% in October.

During the same period, the national bidding war rate plummeted, now making a new 10-year low at 10.1% last month.

Seattle's bidding war among homebuyers was just 8.8% of all transactions in October, well below the 10.1% national average, and also at a 10-year low.

"Homebuyers in Seattle know that in the current market, they don't necessarily have to go through the emotional heartburn that comes with bidding wars," said Seattle Redfin agent Jessie Boucher.

"Even though there aren't a ton of homes for sale right now, buyers are able to preserve their contingencies and maybe even get a great deal," Boucher said.

Redfin's report is a warning that homebuyers are beginning to recognize a possible housing market top.

Many homebuyers don't want to pay top dollar for homes that have seen rapid price inflation over the last eight or so years. Also, home prices have risen faster than wages over the same period, so it's possible that a structural high as been put in -- one where the average American can no longer afford a home, hence why fierce bidding has disappeared across the country.

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Shanghai Housing Sales Plunge 86% In Golden Week

Golden Week, a seven-day Chinese holiday, is traditionally a peak period for home sales.

This year, sales plummeted.

The South China Post reports ‘Golden Week’ Property Sales Plunge in Major Chinese Cities.

Property sales in China’s major cities saw one of their worst “golden week” holidays in years, as buyers held back amid a slowing economy and tight restrictions on mortgage loans.

Sales of new homes in Beijing dropped to their lowest level since 2014 during the week following the National Day holiday, according to data from the property information portal Zhuge.com.

By area, sales of new homes in Shanghai plummeted 86 per cent to 5,000 square metres, while the capital saw a 92 per cent plunge to 2,000 sq metre, according to data from Centaline Property.

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Bidding Wars For US Homes Collapse To Eight-Year Low

Bidding wars for homes in Seattle, San Jose, and San Francisco have crashed in the past year, reflecting an alarming national trend, according to a new report from Redfin.

The report found that the national bidding-war rate in August was 10.4%, down from 42% a year earlier. The rate printed at the lowest level since 2011.

At the start of 2018, the national bidding-war rate was 59%, then plunged as homebuyers became uncomfortable with sky-high housing prices, increasing mortgage rates, and economic uncertainty surrounding the trade war. The housing market started to cool in late 2018, as the competition among homebuyers collapsed by 4Q18, this is an ominous sign for the national housing market that could soon face a steep correction in price.

Even with eight months of declining mortgage rates in 2019, bidding-wars among homebuyers continue to drop. This is somewhat troubling because the government's narrative has been declining rates will boom housing, but as of Wednesday, mortgage applications continue to fall. Homebuyers aren't coming off the sidelines, and there's too much uncertainty surrounding the economy with recession risks at the highest levels in more than a decade.

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An “Earnings Recession” Is Here – Big Companies All Over America Are Reporting Disastrous Financial Results

If the U.S. economy really was “booming”, then corporate earnings would be rising.  But that isn’t happening.  In fact, we haven’t seen corporate earnings fall like this since the last recession.  They fell during the first quarter of this year, and based on the results we have so far, it appears that corporate earnings will be down substantially once again in the second quarter.  When corporate earnings drop for two quarters in a row, that is officially considered to be an “earnings recession”, and that normally occurs just before the overall economy plunges into recession territory.  As things get tighter for our corporate giants, we should expect a lot more layoffs in the months ahead, and the unemployment rate should rise quite briskly.  In other words, it looks like our economic problems are about to accelerate substantially.

This week, some of the largest companies in the entire country reported results for the second quarter, and we witnessed disappointment after disappointment.

And other economic numbers continue to tell us the exact same thing.  For example, we just got the worst U.S. manufacturing PMI number in 118 months.  That is absolutely terrible news, but Europe’s manufacturing sector is doing even worse.

Manufacturing activity is slowing down all over the globe, and a big reason for that is because global trade is shrinking at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last financial crisis.

Meanwhile, we just learned that existing home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year basis for sixteen months in a row.

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Americans Can't Afford To Buy A Home In 70% Of The Country

Even at a time of low interest rates and rising wages, Americans simply can’t afford a home in more than 70% of the country, according to CBS. Out of 473 US counties that were analyzed in a recent report, 335 listed median home prices were more than what average wage earners could afford. According to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions, these counties included Los Angeles and San Diego in California, as well as places like Maricopa County in Arizona.

New York City claimed the largest share of a person's income to purchase a home. While on average, earners nationwide needed to spend only about 33% of their income on a home, residents in Brooklyn and Manhattan need to shell out more than 115% of their income. In San Francisco this number is about 103%. Homes were found to be affordable in places like Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.

This news is stunning because homes are considerably more affordable today than they were a year ago. Although prices are rising in many areas, they are also falling in places like Manhattan. Unaffordability in the market has been the result of slower home building and owners staying in their homes longer. Both have reduced the supply of homes in the market.

And the market may continue to create better conditions for buyers. Affordability could improve because of the fact that homes are out of reach for so many seekers, according to Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. Today’s market is also more affordable than it was a decade ago, before the crisis. Home prices were about the same prior to the crisis, even though income adjusted for inflation was lower.

"What kept the market going was looser lending standards, so that was compensating for affordability issues," Teta said. Since then, standards have toughened (for now, at least).

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Builders Complain Of Record Labor Shortages: Up To 75% Of Employers Can't Find Workers

Late last month we reported the remarkable anecdote of an Ohio factory owner who has numerous blue-collar jobs available at her company, but has one major problem: she is struggling to fill positions because so many candidates fail drug tests. Regina Mitchell, co-owner of Warren Fabricating & Machining in Hubbard, Ohio, told The New York Times this week that four out of 10 applicants otherwise qualified to be welders, machinists and crane operators will fail a routine drug test. While not quite as bad as the adverse hit rate hinted at by the Beige Book, this is a stunning number, and one which indicates of major structural changes to the US labor force where addiction and drugs are keeping millions out of gainful (or any, for that matter) employment.

Mitchell said that her requirements for prospective workers were simple: “I need employees who are engaged in their work while here, of sound mind and doing the best possible job that they can, keeping their fellow co-workers safe at all times." And yet, almost nobody could satisfy these very simple requirements.

Whether it was due to pervasive drug abuse, or for some other reason, but fast forward two weeks when in response to a special question in the July NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) survey, US homebuilders said that labor and subcontractor shortages have become even more widespread in July of 2017 than they were in June of 2016.

This is a concern as the inventory of for-sale homes recently struck a 20-year low. And while economists and the public cry for more inventory, many builders are pressed to meet demand. A labor and subcontractor shortage in the building industry has worsened over the past year, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index survey of single-family builders.

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Dear Fed, It's Not "Really Hard To Spot Bubbles"

Here are some visual aids to help the Fed spot the housing bubble.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari was the latest Fed official to claim in an essay – thus following in the time-honored footsteps of former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke – that “spotting bubbles is hard,” that the Fed cannot see them, and that if it could see them, it shouldn’t do anything to stop them because it had only “limited policy tools,” and because “the costs of making policy mistakes can be very high.”

But it’s OK to use these “limited policy tools” to inflate the greatest bubbles the world has ever seen and then preside over the damage they cause to the real economy before they even implode.

Neither Kashkari nor anyone else working at the Treasury Department in 2006 – when they were tasked by Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to look for signs of trouble because they were “due for some form of crisis,” as he writes – could see any bubbles, not even the housing bubble although it was already beginning to deflate.

“It is really hard to spot bubbles with any confidence before they burst,” Kashkari writes, specifically naming stock prices and house prices. “Everyone can recognize a bubble after it bursts, and then many people convince themselves that they saw it on the way up.”

So here are some visual aids I put together for Kashkari and other Fed governors. It will help them “spot” the beautiful housing bubbles in the US – because bubbles really aren’t hard to recognize before they burst, if you want to recognize them.

What’s hard to predict accurately is when they’ll burst.

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Rent Control Makes For Good Politics And Bad Economics

One needn’t read very much about public policy before coming across some statement to the effect that “bad economics makes good politics.” This statement is clearly untrue when good politics is defined as furthering mutually beneficial arrangements, as good economics is central to that task. But the statement is often true when good politics is defined as attracting 50%-plus-one votes on some issue or candidate, which is a much different standard, leaving plenty of room for government-imposed harms to be imposed on citizens.

Few issues reflect this divergence between “good” politics and bad economics more clearly than rent control. One of the most universally accepted propositions among economists is that rent control produces a host of adverse social consequences with its large involuntary redistribution of wealth and suppression of market prices as communicators of information and incentives. Despite that, it has been adopted as policy in many places and times — and now is a good time to revisit these issues, as efforts are currently underway in several states (including California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois) to repeal existing statewide restrictions on rent control.

How Rent Control Destroys Value 

Rent control takes a large portion of the value of residential properties from landlords. It does so by removing owners’ rights to accept offers willingly made by potential renters. And the value of the rights involved are large. For example, after Toronto imposed rent control in 1975, affected building values fell by 40% over five years, and a decade ago, such losses were estimated at $120 million annually in Santa Monica. A law like rent control, which can take half or more of each apartment’s value from the landlord, harms them just as much taking away half of their apart­ments, even though the latter is recognized as theft. Those stripped property values are given to current tenants, whose resulting bonanzas are shown by the fact that those under strict rent control almost never leave.

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NY Fed President Dudley Thinks A New Housing Bubble Is A Perfect Cure For Soft Retail Sales

In general, most people would agree that the housing collapse of 2008/2009 was a negative event in U.S. history.  A combination of misinformed regulations from Washington D.C., low interest rates, poor underwriting standards that allowed for, among other things, the idiotic "cash out" mortgage, and an insatiable demand for securitizations drove one of the biggest asset bubbles in history which almost brought down the entire global financial system.

But, at least one person, namely New York Fed President Bill Dudley, thinks that a repeat of the 2008 mortgage crisis is exactly the cure for America's stagnant retail sales.  Speaking at the National Retail Federation's annual convention in New York, which was undoubtedly full of perplexed retailers wondering why their store traffic remained so weak amid Obama's stunning "economic recovery", Dudley intimated that the cure for weak retail sales was a return to 2006 practices in which debt thirsty Americans repeatedly withdrew every dollar of equity in their homes to fund their trips to the mall.

“The good news is that, while the current expansion is quite old in chronological terms, it is still relatively young in terms of the health of household finances,” Dudley said in a speech to the National Retail Federation.

“Whatever the timing, a return to a reasonable pattern of home equity extraction would be a positive development for retailers, and would provide a boost to economic growth,” Dudley said.

Homeowners may have overlearned the lessons from the housing boom and bust, the New York Fed President said.

Even though home values have risen over 40% since 2012, housing debt has stayed virtually flat, he said.

“The previous behavior of using housing debt to finance other kinds of consumption seems to have completely disappeared,” and people are leaving the wealth generated by rising home prices “locked up” in their homes, he said.

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