Hello world!

The Federal Government placed a moratorium on Foreclosures during the beginning stages of the COVID pandemic that (kind of) came to an end at the end of September.

I say “kind of” because there are many lenders that extended their own version of the moratorium through the end of the year. On top of that, there were millions of homeowners who took a voluntary forbearance period where they were allowed to stop making mortgage payments and agreed to have the accumulated interest pushed to the end of the loan period.

So in a nutshell, there are several million loans in the US that fall into one of these two categories, and many have said when these homes hit the market, we’re going to see a repeat of the housing bubble. But will we?

The supply of homes for sale has been far too low all year, and it is much worse today than it was one year ago. But that does not mean it’s as bad today as what we’ve seen previously this year.

Take a look at the graph in this week’s one-page special report, we’ve found something you should see!

Year over year home sales rose 8% in September, registering the thirteenth-straight month of gains and a growth streak in fourteen of the past fifteen months.

This week’s graph shows how each month’s sales compared with the same month the year prior, and we’ve got a streak of 13 straight gains. While this is good news, it also creates some grave concerns that we share in this week’s one-page special report.

In my pursuit to find evidence of an impending housing bubble, I continue instead to find evidence of the opposite.

The graph in this week’s one-page special real estate report comes from a dataset produced by Zillow, created to share rental rates from most of the larger US metropolitan areas. We know what home prices have been doing, but take a look at what rental rates are doing at the same time!

I like to track the average value of both new and existing homes that have sold in order to see how far apart they are. This measurement is key in forecasting home value movements.

In this week’s one-page special report, we’ve plotted the average new home value and the average existing home value in order to discover the difference between the two. We’ve seen a recent change in this difference, and I explain why it’s important and what it is causing in this week’s report.