Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

Josh: So, hey, guys, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. I’m so excited to be with you again today. I have a special treat. I’ve invited my friend and my colleague, Daren Blomquist. He is the vice president of Market Economics at Auction.com, back onto the podcast yet again to talk about the trends in the marketplace. Daren, in his previous employment at Adam Data Solutions and his current job as V.P. of market economics at Auction.com does a phenomenal job of aggregating data.

Josh: And you guys will love to hear some of the things that are going on in the marketplace. I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on with forbearances? What’s going on with foreclosures? What’s going on with home sales? What’s going on with home prices and all these things? Right now, it seems like the mainstream news is talking nothing except for the election and COVID. They’re not really talking about the status of the actual real estate market. And oh, by the way, if they were talking about the status of the real estate market, they would be calling Daren anyway to interview him and his statistics and information to tell them what’s going on with the market. He’s been featured on CNBC, Fox News, CNN and many, many, many major media outlets. We’re excited to have him back yet again.

Josh:Daren, thanks so much for joining me on Accelerated Investor. How are you?

Daren: I’m doing well. Yeah, I think we need something bad to happen in the housing market for them to start calling. That’s when I was on most of those programs is when the foreclosure crisis was at its height. And we were tracking foreclosures, of course. But yeah, I mean, the housing, we can jump into this. But the stuff that actually has been reported out there is mostly good news about the housing market. But I think there’s certainly some stuff below the surface that creates some concern for the long term of the housing market and some opportunity as well. So that’s the theme of what I put together for today is this now and not yet idea, especially from the perspective of real estate investors. There are some opportunities now, but we actually see probably even bigger opportunities coming down the road because of all that’s going on. And we’ll get into that.

Josh: Phenomenal. Just to kind of debrief everybody above. About three months ago, Daren came on. It was early April. We were kind of recapping what happened in the first quarter, maybe mid-April. And at that time, if you remember, we talked about this example, the small example size of the hurricanes that hit in 2017 and them offering forbearance agreements and loan modifications in the New Jersey market and how they were able to basically do a foreclosure moratorium for nine months.

Josh: And that became the kind of the blueprint for COVID for banks and the government to give people some forbearance agreements and eviction and mortgage moratorium. The difference is three years ago it was this very small sample size of New Jersey, New York. Now it’s the entire country. So we talked about that, and we’ll give you an update on that piece. The other thing we talked about back then was that demand was down significantly.

Josh: It was down about 24 percent based off of Redfin. And Redfin basically tracks homebuyers that are going on tours for the first time. That’s kind of their definition of new buyer demand versus supply, which was new home listings on the MLS with Realtors, the National Association of Realtors. That was down about 55 percent. Now, that was right in the middle when COVID was really scary. Nobody knew what was going on with the disease. How catchy is it?  What’s the mortality rate? People were really afraid to leave their homes. Three months later, the economy starting to open back up. People are getting more comfortable with what the risk is and they’re moving back out.

Josh:SoDaren will definitely jump in and give us some updates on that as we go. So, Daren, I want to kind of turn this over to you. I can bump through the slide. So just tell me, like, hey. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. If you catch this on i-Tunes, we are going to have a corresponding YouTube video. So check this out on YouTube to make sure if you can actually see the slides that we’re sharing. So, Daren, where shall we begin?

Daren: You can just move forward to the next slide. I’ll start with some just high-levelmacro-economic trends, which are unemployment rate. And I think this provides a good theme for the housing market as well is this idea that the short term versus the long-term impact of this crisis that we’re in. And really what is going to matter to most people and to the economy and the housing market ultimately is the long-term impact. And there’s just a lot of noise going on in the short-term stuff. And you can see that here with the unemployment rate, the blue lines represent the overall unemployment rate. And there’s two not to confuse the issue. There’s two lines, depending on how you look at that unemployment rate. But they’re going in. The similar trend, which is huge spike and followed by actually some really good improvement in the June numbers unemployment numbers and actually May as well.

Daren:So you see this huge spike in April and then an improvement in June, excuse me, an improvement in May and June off of that spike. And that’s really more around the short term. The reopening happening then fairly quickly, actually. And a lot of people regaining their jobs. Now, there’s a whole nother conversation about what we’re going to see. It has some of the slowdowns in the reopenings. But at the end of the day, it’s that short term stuff is not as impactful because we have a lot of government intervention happening. And, you know, and the fact that it’s short term and what we’re keeping our eye on in terms of our business. And I think that investors should ultimately keep their eye on is that red line, which is a way of looking at unemployment that takes out all the temporary layoffs.

Daren: And it also includes job seekers who maybe haven’t searched because of the crisis but would still be unemployed. And anyway, that core number is continuing to rise. It’s not extremely high, but it is continuing to rise off of its lows prior to the pandemic. And that’s ultimately what’s going to drive distress in the housing market in terms of foreclosures, which, of course, is opportunity for investors. So that’s a theme. And I think we’ll you know, we’ll continue that theme. One of the if you go to the next slide, this short term versus long term piece. And it really comes into play because it’s an election year. You know, and I hate to get to you know, I don’t want to get too much into politics, but it is having an impact because of all the push to try to not make things look as bad in the short term, and I think a lot of that good motivation.

Daren: This is this unforeseen crisis that nobody anticipated. And so government policymakers are doing their best to say, hey, look, let’s get people through that so we can get to the other side and pick up where we left off. Type of idea. But. The ideas is a lot of effort and policy and political will being pushed toward making the short term not look so bad in terms of the impact of this crisis. The problem with, and this is data straight from Oxford Economics. This is not something I’m making up, but this is their headlines Trading Short Term Gain for Long Run Pain. Because of all this, this effort to make things look better in the short term and to ease the impact in the short term, they actually upperwardly revised their GDP forecast, which the GDP numbers just came out yesterday.

Daren: But they upperwardly revised their GDP forecast to not be as severe as they originally had anticipated. But the tradeoff there is that they see a bigger risk for this double dip scenario that over the long term, you actually could see another dip in the GDP. And so that’s a risk that they see increasing even now in the short term. They’re upwardly revising the numbers to not look as bad.

Josh: Yeah. The whole idea there, for folks that don’t understand, double dips is obviously you pump the system full of surplus. I mean not surplus. But stimulus, PPP money, stimulus checks, relief, all kinds of stuff for businesses and for regular citizens. And then businesses don’t actually reopen their doors or businesses don’t actually have permanent job gain. And then that stimulus eventually wears off. The election is over. November 3rd. I don’t think any of us can hope that it comes fast enough. So this could just get all behind us and we can move on to a nonpolitical year and then all that wears off.

Josh: And then all of a sudden, none of that, none of it permanently takes hold. And then there’s a new dip in GDP that goes back down. And that’s a real risk because depending on who’s elected, depending on how long the stimulus lasts, you have that double dip scenario. So we’ll see what happens there. Love to see possibilities of which almost, you know, it’s nice to see them. And all the options of which they’re almost never exactly right. But it’s nice to see the scenario of what could happen. I love to look at this mortgage application volume. And I know this is already about two or three weeks old. You said there’s some new information that just came out, but tell us about purchase applications and what it really means when people are applying for home mortgages and applying for refinances. What does that indicate?

Daren: Sure. Yeah, this is a measurement of demand. And I switched horses on you here. Last time I looked at Redfin measurement of demand. This is actually a little more consistent data and it’s also weekly. So anyway, but if you look at those blue lines, got blue bars going negative. That was when we last talked in April. Demand was sinking. And by this, you know, if you look at this just rapidly, it was down as low as 35 percent. And to answer your question, this is from the Mortgage Bankers Association. It’s a survey of their members, their banks. And in terms of mortgage application volume, specifically for purchase mortgages. So these are people who are applying for a loan to buy a property and sell it for. It’s a somewhat forward-looking measurement of home sales down the road.

Daren: And it’s a measurement of how many people are interested in trying to buy a property. They’re going to be making an offer because they’re applying for a mortgage. And so that was way off double digits. Thirty five percent at the bottom of this back in April. But then starting in an in mid-May, we started to see those numbers come up. And they’ve been up now for. Actually, there is another week’s worth of data here that’s not included. But it was up again for a ninth consecutive week.

Daren: And refis are also up, the chart is not reflecting refi, but that’s kind of a different market. This is looking at folks looking to buy properties. And so refis have skyrocketed. Not surprisingly, because of the low mortgage rates. This also is driven partially by the low mortgage rates, but also because people have regained some confidence in the economy and the housing market. So they’re saying, yeah, we’re going to go out and buy properties.

Josh: I know even my neighbor directly next door, big, beautiful luxury home, put the house on the market, sold over asking price in less than a day. And of course, the house was beautiful. It’s updated. It checks all the boxes. But obviously, somebody who moved in, who I’m getting to know, my new neighbor, was not afraid. Right, to apply for a mortgage, buy a home and invest in a new property right in the middle of COVID. So matter of fact, I was blown away by how many houses or how many buyers were going through the house. Even on the first day, I think there were twelve showings. People in and out, in and out, in and out. And I thought, OK, like, if you’re a real buyer, you’re not. If you’re looking for a house, you’re not afraid of COVID and walking through a property.

Josh:People, that’s starting to kind of wear off a little bit. And they just closed and moved in about a week ago. So, you know, I definitely see people coming and going. And supply is still so low. It’s snapped back. And we’re gonna talk about that next. But supply is still down overall relative to demand. And we saw a real lack of supply 30 to 60 days ago, which we talked about in the previous podcast. So tell us about that. How is home sales doing rebounding? How are home sales prices going?

Daren: Yes. So this is the NAR data on home sales and prices. And the graph on the left there is showing in May there was a twenty-seven percent drop year over year in the number of sales. So that is somewhat a reflection of the demand that we saw in April. It’s also a reflection of inventory. And I don’t really have an inventory graph here, but supply was down around as much as 50 percent range. Now, what it doesn’t show here and again, because this data is a pretty volatile in the June numbers, we saw twenty two percent increase month over month. I want to be clear on that in existing home sales. So they did bounce back pretty strong in June. And that makes sense given the rise in demand that was on the previous slide. So people are interested in buying. They actually are buying now. 

Daren: The demand, if you roughly compare the demand metric we just looked at, which is up year over year consistently for the last nine weeks. On the wholesale side, even though there was this 22 percent month over month increase in home sales. Home sales were still down eleven percent year over year. And so that gives an indication that demand is outstripping supply. And so more people want to want to buy than are actually able to buy. And that could be partially because of supply, partially because lending standards are still pretty tight. But we are seeing that bounce back. That that doesn’t show up on this graph in the sales. And then on the right side, you see the prices.

Daren: And those have a lot of people will jump on the theme that this is all supply driven, lack of supply driven. I would argue, based on the graph on the right, that there is even though demand is coming back, there’s something there that’s preventing home prices from continuing to accelerate. Home price appreciation. So you see that home price appreciation dropped to two point three percent. And that’s the slowest home price appreciation we’ve seen from NAR numbers since way back in February 2012.

Daren:So and that did actually it ticked up a little bit to three point five percent and in the June numbers. But it’s still on the low side of what we had been seeing in terms of home price appreciation. And so I think a lot of this is lack of supply driven. But there’s also some hindrances that are keeping home prices from accelerating even though they are continuing to go up. But overall, when you look at this, you say the housing market is performing extremely well given the crisis that we’re in.

Josh: Yeah, I’m excited to see what this looks like in a month or two from now. Obviously, this data trails a month or two and we’ll see how things go. But to see home sales units snapping back and home sale prices even going up even a little bit shows the resiliency of the market, the lack of supply. And also, I think the fact that over the last eight years, as we’ve talked about on many, many, many previous calls with you, Daren, the number of institutional buyers that have bought tens of thousands of units and taken them off the market essentially turn them into rental properties again, is another indicator of some overall lack of supply.

Josh: If those institutions hadn’t stepped into the market back in 2011, 2012, we would probably have way too much supply in the market. We’d still be struggling. This next slide, I was looking at this particular slide when we were getting ready for the call and looking at home price appreciation really happening. A lot of people think of home price appreciation happening near the city, you know, near big cities and people wanting to move to the urban core. That was the theme for years, people moving back into the city. And now, you know, in Q2 2020, there was home price appreciation. But really the best places were that kind of mid-sized cities, mid-sized suburbs, the rural fringe areas. It seemed like home prices were appreciating more there than the large city, you know, inner core of large cities. And so is that an indicator of, you people just wanting more space, wanting to move out of the fringe? Is it a matter of safety? Is it riots? I don’t know. I’m interested to hear your take on it, because there’s so many crazy factors going on right now.

Daren: Yeah, we did this analysis based on the fact that a lot of people were saying, anecdotally, yes, people want to get out of the cities and there’s a safety factor to that in terms of the health of the densely packed cities that may be more susceptible to the virus. And also potentially the riots. So anyway, there was a lot of people out there anecdotally talking about that. So we just looked at the data. And actually we are seeing that happen in the data in terms of this home price appreciation, that demand is stronger outside of the large cities, in the suburbs, as you said, the mid-sized cities, the fringe rural areas, which are areas that are within five miles of an urbanized area. So they’re not too far out.

Daren: But the rural remote areas are not performing very well, as you can see there at the bottom of the graph. So places that are way far out. So this does drive into that narrative. And I think this is really interesting to me. And I think it’s a really key thing for real estate investors who are looking at where to invest. This is could be a key kind of demographic trend that you look at. And I think it probably does have some legs. There is a little bit of a frenzy nature to it, a reactive nature to the virus and all of what’s going on. I’ll talk more about this in the next slide. It’s a continuation of a longer-term trend that we’ve seen. So I think it does have some legs.

Daren: But I just wanted to point out, we are seeing the right graph here shows that investors who are using Auction.com to buy properties are responding to this and they they’re showing more demand. The way that we look at demand, which is a sales rate. The percentage of properties that are available for auction then actually end up selling that sales rate is stronger in the suburbs and even the rural areas. We actually see a slight decline on the online REO auctions in the cities for that sales rate. So investors are responding who are using our platform to that trend. And the next slide does show this is going back to 2019, pre-COVID that there are some elements of this move away from the big cities that were already in place.

Daren: Now, it was for different reasons. It was for high taxes and it was for weather potentially and some things like that. So the blue here is states that people were moving away from. Net migration data from the Census Bureau. The orange is where people are moving to in 2019. And you see California, New York are some of the places that people are moving away from. And if you drill down to the county level, they’re on the right, which, by the way, if you make this available, which I’m happy to, to your listeners as you can, they can click on this and actually go in on the right hand side and see their county, what’s happening there. But at the county level, it starts to get pretty interesting, you see, like in California, but all the coastal counties are orange or most of the coastal counties are orange. But if you go inland a little bit, there is excuse me, most of the coastal counties are blue meaning they’re losing population. Inland counties tend to be orange. 

Josh: Is that due to price, because the coastal counties are so expensive being on the ocean? Is it policy? Because they’re all paying the same taxes. They’re all in California. Right?

Daren: Within a place like California, it is affordability. And then it’s all the higher the price, the higher tax. And I think that’s the main driver there. It’s pretty interesting to look at the county level. In general, I think it is the fact that California is down is an indication of the combination of higher prices there and higher taxes and possibly politics ties into that as well. But yeah, we saw the 2017 tax reform bill did hurt those higher priced targets, because you take away some of the ability to deduct on your income taxes. There’s a cap on how much you can deduct from state and local taxes on your federal taxes. So that negatively impacted some of those high-priced markets like California and New York. So I mention all this to say there is a trend happening and I think some of the trend has been accelerated by the pandemic.

Josh: Yeah, you mentioned that our audience might be able to drill down into the county level. Just tell us how they would do that. What website would they go to?

Daren: We also put that in show notes to. Yeah, have a link here that you see there at the top., I guess the best. It’s a tableau map. So if you do a Google search for Daren Blomquist Tableau, you’ll see all my maps pop up there. And this is one of them where the more recent ones. And but yeah, you can. That little linkage embedded there. Josh, you can feel free to share with. And maybe you can even bring it up on the screen here. Well, we’re talking that. See what’s happening in Ohio.

Josh: Yeah, I actually do have it open the screen on recording from is locked, but I don’t want to tinker with this too much just for the sake of time. But I am on my other screen tinkering with it. Nobody can see it, but yeah, I’ll definitely play with this. But we’ll put that link, that Tableau link in the show notes so everybody can check that out. And when we email out the this invite to our followers and our students will include that Tableau link right in the body of the email as well. So next slide talks about delinquency. And this is this is becoming a hot button for a lot of people. I’m starting to see more and more email copy from some of my friends who are affiliates, who are speakers and trainers talking about there’s going to be opportunity. They’re starting to see that forbearances are spiking, obviously. Delinquencies are spiking.

Josh: And there’s going to be a percentage of these folks very similar to the hurricane data that don’t make it out, that don’t come back current. So let’s just explain this. What we’re looking at here and then based on our previous conversation about the hurricanes, what is some potential outcomes? Maybe a year from now from all these delinquencies. So just kind of explain the graph and then help interpret what is what does the future look like based on this data?

Daren: Sure. This is data from Black Knight and they actually just cited data came out from out yesterday that that did fall in line with what I kind of predict here. Which is that middle bullet, 90-day delinquency will likely spike in June. Our June data did show the 90-day delinquency spike. So what we’re looking at is, it’s not a delinquency rate. It’s actually number of people who are delinquent in the bars there. And it’s broken out by 30 days delinquent, 60 days, 90 days. 90 days is the red. You see the spike in the 30 days right away there in April. So people, a lot of those folks going into forbearance for not making their payments. And so you saw the spike that was higher than any single month going back in the Great Recession in terms of the number of people who went delinquent.

Daren: And then the next month, you saw the same thing happen with the kind of gray bar area, which is the 60 days delinquent went higher than at any level back. Kind of in most months going back, as far as I can see, in the in the Great Recession. And then we expected that to cascade through, and it did. And then we saw the number of according to state of the number of the 90-day delinquencies jumped triple from April to excuse me, May to June. And so and they said on the call yesterday they are expecting those 90 days to peak potentially until there’s this double dip scenario. And they actually, it’s funny, they mentioned in the call that this is shaping up to look a lot like the hurricanes.

Daren:So to your point, those rapid spike in delinquencies, especially when you have a forbearance program as a kind of a safety net for folks. People are using that safety net. And there’s this very rapid ramp up and delinquencies. And the shape, if you overlay the shape of that curve to the shape of the curve during some of the previous hurricanes over the last years, it looks very similar. Now, the big question is, will this behave like the hurricanes as we get out of it? And that’s harder to determine. I mean, if it does, the best-case scenario is it does. The performance there is about five percent of the property that went into forbearance/delinquent ended up at foreclosure, being foreclosed on, one to five percent. So it’s pretty low number.

Daren: I would suspect my personal opinion is that you’re going to see higher than that with this. This is a more widespread. It’s not regionally. And so it’s affecting the economy as a whole. Not just one local area and potentially also it’s going to be a more long lasting.

Josh: And if they’ve gotten a job loss of all of these companies that have filed for bankruptcy. Some major companies. Right. Pier one. J. Crew, you know Victoria’s Secret. Their U.K. division. Hertz Rental Car. Chesapeake Bay Energy. You know, that doesn’t happen in a hurricane. That’s a short-term loss. There are typically not major companies that go bankrupt because of a hurricane. Because of COVID, you’ve actually seen significant number of companies go flat out bankrupt. Some of them will never come back. That’s an element of the wider spread problem of COVID versus a very small potential problem. And I hate to say small, but a severe regional problem with a hurricane. So that is I think like you talked about the data being different on the outcome, is that in the short term, we’re delaying the pain and eventually those properties will end up in some state of either refinance, sale, or foreclosure due to nonpayment when the moratoriums are lifted and the forbearance agreements don’t last anymore.

Josh: Problem is, is then will those folks have a job to go to to reinstate their loan? It’s just a wider spread problem now than with a very regional hurricane. So I do anticipate, you know, people are asking, do you think this is going to be two thousand, eight, nine, 10? I said no. I personally don’t feel like it is. I think it’s going to be a smaller version of that. And I also don’t think it’s going to last like the two thousand eight, nine, 10. It took so long for people to figure out what the hell was going on that lasted almost all the way into 2015 16. It was about a seven year problem.

Josh: This is going to be something that I don’t think last nearly as long. I think we’re well more equipped and prepared to deal with this because we just went through the recession 10 years ago. You know, people realize what were the policies that worked or the policies that didn’t work versus in 2008. I hate to say it this way, but we all got caught with our pants down. Nobody knew what was going on. And so we were very reactive. This time we’re very proactive. And I think that’s going to help.

Daren: I mean, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Yeah, I totally agree. You just said that. Well, yeah, that’s the image I don’t want. To that, the bias I had is that the forbearance, I think, service and policymaking that forbearance, proactive forbearance programs works very well in the hurricanes. And this is not a hurricane, but the more that they can follow that route, the better. What I don’t think worked well when we got caught with our pants down was just the blanket, more foreclosure moratoriums that just delayed everything.

Daren: And that just created more uncertainty and also a backlog of foreclosures, which was that eventually had to come up in a state that they won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Whatever analogy you want to use, that the forbearance program works very well to protect people from unnecessary foreclosure without creating this uncertainty and shadow inventory in the market that ends up hurting the market and making the pain last longer than it really needs to listen.

Josh:So I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Daren Blomquist V.P. of market economics at Auction.com. Please go visit their website at Auction.com. Jump on, log in and use their platform to acquire properties. Again, there’s over 3000 foreclosures are typically processed, and over fifteen hundred a week are actually sold on the Auction.com platform. It’s a fantastic tool. So I’ve enjoyed this conversation with Daren and I.

Josh: Don’t forget, we’re also going to release in part two of this conversation, if you enjoyed it. Give us a five-star review. Leave us the rating. We’ll send you a free T-shirt. Also, don’t forget a copy of our free book, The Flip System. You can get it for free at GetFlipSystem.com. Get it absolutely free. Just pay the shipping and handling. We’ll send it out to you. Auction.com is one of the tools that I talk about in the book as a way to acquire great deals at huge discounts. Thanks for joining me today on Accelerated Investor. 

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You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five-star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.