Josh Cantwell: So, hey there, everybody, welcome back to Accelerated Real Estate Investor with Josh Cantwell. I’m your host and looking forward to this discussion today with my good friend Daren Blomquist. Daren is the Executive Vice President of Market Economics at Auction.com. He is essentially their living economist, if you will. And they just absolutely gather just tremendous amounts of data about the economy and then share that data with our clients. And as you probably know, their clients are banks and institutions that are listing properties on their platform for sale. The other side of their clients are the buyers, the buyers that are buying properties on their platform. Many of you have probably bought on Auction.com or you have looked at properties on Auction.com, and Daren’s a big piece of their leadership team, especially when it comes to the market economics of what’s happening.

So, as you know, once a quarter, I love to bring Daren on to discuss what’s going on with the market. So, today, we’re going to discuss, number 1, the perplexing labor shortage; number 2, inflation; number 3, housing affordability; and then number 4, the existing home sales; and a number of other topics as well. I always love to have this discussion with Daren. He brings me up to speed as well as all of our audience up to speed on exactly what’s happening in the economy and what data they’re crunching. So, without further ado, let me welcome in Daren Blomquist from Auction.com.

[INTERVIEW]

Josh Cantwell: Daren, thanks so much for jumping on today.

Daren Blomquist: Thank you, Josh. Great to be here.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, absolutely. So, Daren, let’s jump in right away with this labor shortage. I think so many people are wondering, like what is really going on? Just seeing these articles about these ports in Southern California, and there are all these shipping containers, and then you hear the rumors that there’s nobody that’s working, the longshoremen working on the port docks to pull those off and get them into trucks. There’s a shortage of truckers. And then I drive up and down my streets, and there, every single business seems to have a for-hire sign. So, tell us about what’s going on with this perplexing labor shortage?

Daren Blomquist: Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing on the street there is it’s showing up in the macro data, for sure. On the left-hand side of this chart, for those of you who are viewing this, basically, we’re showing the number of unemployed and the number of job openings. And the number of unemployed has been decreasing since that it spiked when the pandemic hit last year, but it’s been decreasing, and we’re down to, I believe, around eight million or less than eight million unemployed, but we’re at over 10 million job openings. And so, we have two million more job openings than unemployed.

It actually came down a little bit in August. It was at 2.4 million in July of this basically, deficit of job– or I should say, excess of job openings of 2.4 million in July. That was the highest that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had ever recorded. Their data goes back to 2,000 on that particular data point, but the strange thing is that we’re still five million jobs below pre-pandemic levels. So, we haven’t recovered all of those five million. Well, at one point, we lost about 21 million jobs. We’ve regained most of those, but there’s still five million that we haven’t gotten back, but then, on the other hand, there’s this surplus of two million job openings that are not being filled.

And so, we can get into some of the theories on that, but on the right-hand side, what we’re showing for those of you who are viewing is the unemployment rate, which has come down to 4.8%. So, that looks great. It’s coming down very quickly, but part of the reason for that unemployment rate going down is that we’re not seeing people jump back into the labor force. And so, if you’re not looking for a job, you’re not counted as unemployed. And so, the labor force participation rate was hovering around 63.5%. Back before the pandemic, it dropped to as low as 60%. It’s come up kind of halfway in between to about 61.5%, which doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it makes the difference in millions of people.

So, people are not coming back to the workforce, and there have been some theories around unemployment benefits are keeping people on the sideline. Of course, if you’re getting unemployment benefits, you are in that labor force participation. I do have a theory that all the forbearance programs for folks with the mortgage and the eviction moratorium have helped to motivate some people. If you’re not having to make your biggest payment every month, which is your house payment, then you may not be as motivated to start looking for a job. That’s, I think, part of it. And then part of it is people may be still scared of the virus, of course, and not going back to work because of that, but at the end of the day, we kind of end up in this strange situation where we have a bit of a shortage of labor.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, interestingly enough, that labor force participation rate, even if it’s only changed by 2%, when you multiply that times roughly 200 million people that work in the US between all the working-age folks between the age of, let’s say, 18 and roughly 65 or 70, it’s about 200 million out of the 330 million in the country, 2% on 200 million is four million jobs, four million people that is different than it was just two years ago, people participating in the job market.

Daren Blomquist: Yeah, another aspect of this that I forgot to mention that just has kind of become a thing is I added in the job quit, so people quitting their job, and that rose to an all-time high as well just in July and August around, I believe, yeah, over three million people quitting their jobs. And so, it’s not just people not coming back to the workforce, but in part because of this labor shortage, it’s workers, employees have the upper hand, and so, more of them are quitting and either leaving the workforce or jumping to another job that for whatever reason, is more appealing to them, whether that’s compensation or the ability to work remotely or whatever.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, well, I think, look, one of the great things about capitalism is it allows the free markets to work. And right now, what you’re seeing is the free markets have been massively disrupted by COVID and then massively disrupted by all this government interference with eviction moratoriums, foreclosure moratoriums that’s not allowing the free markets to work. And so, now, what we’re seeing is the aftermath of the free markets coming back, and people now saying, “Well, look, now, I need to make more money. My rent is going up,” if they’re working and paying their rent or they want to buy a new house. House values have gone up tremendously in the last two years. I want to buy a new house, and what you’re paying me from two years ago doesn’t cut it anymore.

So, also, there are the people that, first of all, could be the vaccine mandates, they just don’t want to get vaccinated. That’s a reason. It could be that their compensation is not covering their bills because of all the inflation which we’ll talk about, so they’re going to quit their job and just go find something else. Many people, again, employers that are demanding people kind of return to office. They don’t want to return to office because they enjoy the work-from-home environment. Or you mix that, it’s just kind of an alphabet soup, if you will, of stuff of different reasons why people would quit.

And also, I think people are seeing like they’re seeing the top 1% or the top 5% or the top 10% of people making tremendous amounts of money. The Jeff Bezos’s little world, etc., etc., they were really not affected by the pandemic at all. Matter of fact, they probably made out. And that’s a lot of times what happens in a recession is that top 1% or 5% or 10% of the folks that can borrow money because they’re very creditworthy, they can easily borrow money, and even at cheaper rates, if you look at what the Federal Reserve has done with lowering rates, the highly compensated. And look, I’m in that category, right? So, I’m talking sort of about, certainly not in Jeff Bezos’s category, but I’m certainly in the category of somebody who can still qualify to borrow tremendous amounts of money at very cheap rates. It helps someone like me or those types of folks to continue to build their businesses because money’s so freaking cheap, right?

So, I think the regular worker is saying, “Look, screw that. I don’t like the disparity in economics. I’m out. I’m going to do my own thing. I’m going to start over. I’m going to restart my life.” Not surprisingly, after a pandemic, people are in that state of, I guess, reflection to say, like, “What do I want the next part of my life to look like now that there’s been so much upheaval? So, with all those things considered, I could see it. I guess, Daren, like, how does it get fixed? Nobody’s got a crystal ball, but what are some things maybe that you guys are thinking about or theorizing about that kind of normalizes the market? What are your thoughts on that?

Daren Blomquist: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I mean, I think this labor shortage is just another driver of inflation itself because as you have that labor shortage, employers have to raise their wages to attract workers. And so, as you raise wages, that’s going to contribute to inflation as well. And so, I think, I mean, I am a big believer in allowing the free market to correct itself, and there may be a little bit of pain involved. Understandably, there is a lot of money thrown at the pandemic, but if we continue that cycle, we’re never really going to get out of this. So, actually, I think allowing inflation to– I mean, there’s not a lot they can do about inflation except for raise interest rates, but I think allowing that to take place and allowing the market to– all this stimulus has gone to heat up both the economy and the housing market. And at this point, we don’t need to throw more fuel on the fire. We need to allow the fire to die out, I guess. To continue on that analogy, I think, is the best-case scenario going forward, and hope that things have not already become so overheated that it’s hard to pull back.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, man, I mean, some things are starting to feel like the housing market of 2007, 2006, but for totally different reasons. Like back then, it was all of the no-income/no-asset loans, and then the ratings agency qualifying those loans are still triple-A-rated. Everybody bought those mortgage-backed securities, a totally different scenario now, but regardless, there’s a tremendous amount of money in the system. And if you can borrow money and buy assets with cheap money, which is usually what the top 1% to 10% do, they’re borrowing money at 1% or 5% and then putting it back in play in their business or buying assets. Unfortunately, the regular working class that’s living paycheck to paycheck, or maybe month to month or quarter to quarter, they’re not participating in all those assets, they’re not participating in the upside.

So, all that upside is still going typically to the very top 1% or 5% or 10% of the taxpayers, of the citizens because they have the advantages of cheap money and qualifying for credit. So, it’s very, very unequal. It’s very unequal. It’s very unequal, is, I guess, the only way to say it because the rich are getting richer as interest rates stay lower. And even look, again, talking specifically about myself, like we’re qualifying for massive loans, like tens of millions of dollars to buy apartments, of which most people couldn’t do right now. I’m not apologizing for it because that’s my business, that’s what we do, but I also realize the advantage that these low-interest rates are giving me. It’s not really fair to everybody, right?

Daren Blomquist: Yeah, I mean, we could jump to inflation if you went there, the inflation side, but…

Josh Cantwell: Let’s do that.

Daren Blomquist: We’re seeing all of the stimulus adding to the fuel of the economic fire has been impacting inflation and originally, the Fed called the inflation transitory, but actually, more folks are coming out, including folks at the Fed saying it looks less transitory now because we’re seeing this inflation. If you take out food and energy there, we’re at a 30-year high in inflation in the last few months. And then if you include food or energy, and I’m looking at two inflationary measures here, which are the consumer price index (CPI) and the PCE, I should know the name, which actually is what the Fed looks at as the PCE index, but those are both showing very similar trends where we’re basically at the highest level, even without food and energy at the highest level since 2008 there.

And so, this is a point where the Fed is starting to realize that they’re probably going to need to not continue to stimulate the economy because it’s already very stimulated, and in fact, pull back on some of the stimuli and then even potentially, next year, start to raise their federal funds rate, all of this, which will have an impact on raising mortgage rates, potentially. And yeah, I mean, so for your scenario, we’re in a situation where there’s a limited supply of housing. And so, the folks you can qualify to buy that housing and have the means to buy that housing are the ones buying it. And so, they’re taking advantage of the situation, like you are in your business, which is totally rational, but certainly, there are folks who are not able to buy because there is not enough supply.

And so, the question is, as interest rates rise, and the next slide shows, already we’re at an affordability, we’re hitting some affordability ceilings or thresholds. And if we’re going to see mortgage rates go up next year and getting more expensive to borrow money, that’s going to make affordability even more challenging for these folks who haven’t been able to buy. And so, that to me, is going to definitely put some pressure on the demand side of the housing equation that we haven’t seen for a little while, but this is actually data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that’s showing affordability at its worst level since 2008. That was even worse, leading into the last recession, if they went back to 2006, 2005, it was even worse than it is now, but we are seeing some of these.

There are different ways of looking at affordability, but this is just one that is starting to raise some warning flags, even with mortgage rates below 3% that we’ve seen most of this year. We’re hitting these affordability thresholds because of the rising prices. And so, yeah, I mean, I think what you said is right. There are folks making hay during this– thanks to the response to the pandemic, the low cost of borrowing money, and those folks are doing just fine. Next year, as interest rates rise, those folks will probably pull back, but the buyers who haven’t been able to take advantage of this market may not be able to, at that point, anywhere, anyway because of these rising interest rates.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, amazing to see all the levers being pulled and pushed all at the same time, right? So, incomes are stagnant but need to go up because there are employers that need workers, and those employers want to make more money and they need more people. So, if you need more people, and people aren’t willing to work at whatever you want to pay, you’ve got to raise your wages. So, that’s making things more inflationary. At the same time, the Fed is allowing people that lever to be a solo that people are borrowing, which is inflationary.

And so, I begin as we’re talking here, Daren, I just keep thinking about the average worker. The average American household makes about $60,000 to $62,000 dollars a year, a number of them are working in dual-income households, maybe doing things even in the hospitality area, where the hospitality is not coming back very fast. It was coming back, but not as fast as it went away. And so, how are those folks going to be able to afford any of this, like so much of the average American middle class that’s being priced out of everything, right? And especially, if they want a job that pays more, the employer is going to want an exchange of value, like what can you do in exchange for more money? And if all you can do is wait tables or bartend, the value exchange isn’t there.

Like last week, I went to an outback, my daughter had a volleyball game, right? It’s not that an outback. The restaurant was empty. It was maybe five tables taken. The lady said it was a 10-minute wait just to get a table. Like what? And we waited. We waited in the bar for another 10 minutes. So, now, 20 minutes go by. Nobody even came to our drink order. I went over to the hostess table. I said, “What’s going on? You guys are short of workers, aren’t you?” She said, “Yep, there are only two or three people in the entire restaurant working.” Like, okay, so how does that course correct? I don’t know if there is an answer.

Daren Blomquist: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the market can figure that out. There are maybe some painful points to go through. I mean, are you as a consumer willing to pay more to get that service? Or is there a certain point where you say, “Well, it’s not worth it, I’ll just go somewhere else or get my food somewhere else?”

Josh Cantwell: Or grow in the backyard.

Daren Blomquist: I think your question is a really good one, too, about what are those people going to do, those average workers? And I think one of the answers is in this heatmap here, and we’ve talked about this before, but somewhat enabled, this was already happening before the pandemic, but accelerated by the pandemic. They’re going to move away from those orange areas in the heatmap, and they’re going to move to whatever that color is, all of the areas and more in the middle of the country to find affordable housing. And there’s more of them that can do remote work now, so that helps them. But again, we were already seeing that trend before the pandemic, and so that I think that will continue, people will chase that affordability, at least in terms of the housing to help be able to survive.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, I just read an article this morning about the CEO of ARC Financial’s a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, and they’re moving their offices from New York to St. Petersburg, Florida. So, who doesn’t want to be in St. Petersburg, Florida, St. Pete Beach, warm, nice, no state income tax, more affordable? And she mentioned in the article that St. Pete Beach costs about 20% to 25% of New York City. So, you take whatever wage you’re making, let’s say, it’s $400,000, and you can afford a $4 million house. Well, now, you’re still making 400 grand, but that same house is only $800,000. It’s 20% or 25%. So, how much more affordable does that make it? It’s amazing, right?

So, this is one of the reasons why we buy apartments in the Midwest, the South and the Southeast, and the Sunbelt, really can’t find many deals right now in Florida. And as you can tell from the heatmap, this is affordability for residential housing, but apartments, they react very much the same. This is why we have buildings outside of Atlanta. This is why we have buildings in Mobile, Alabama. This is why we have buildings in Cleveland because it matches the affordability. Prices for apartments and for housing are very much in lockstep together. And so, again, you look at these high taxes in these certain areas like California, the Northwest, the Northeast, and the affordability issues, no surprise, I guess, those people are moving and moving quickly.

So, Daren, maybe let’s cover this next slide and then maybe wrap up for today. And have you come back in a Part 2 because I figured we already covered so much, but we should do two parts here, maybe have you come back next week and record again, but I do want to talk about existing home sales, and what’s happening with the appreciation of home sales, existing home sales, the number that are trading and selling. We talked earlier. We’ve talked right in the middle of the pandemic when it hit, I think it was in April of 2020. We talked about the drop-off in March of a number of people that were listing the properties for sale, and supply went down like 65%, but demand only dropped by about 20% to 25%. And I remember talking then, which was over 15 months ago about how we predicted that prices would go up. And that’s exactly what’s happened. So, what’s the state of the market today?

Daren Blomquist: Yeah. So, if you look back there, we see a classic V-shaped recovery in the housing market with the home sales on the left-hand side. They did drop for a few months there. March, April. Yeah, March, April, May, June, it really started to come back, and after that, has been very strong. Now, what we’re seeing is kind of the first sign of a pullback from that. You see on the far right-hand side, if you’re viewing this, that we saw the first decrease in home sales year over year, the first time in 14 months. Now, part of that has to do with we had such a strong market last year, but that is pulling back a little bit, and I think it ties into the affordability conversation is that buyers are starting to say, “This is too much. We can’t afford this.” And so, they’re actually starting to pull back a little bit. So, demand is starting to pull back. We’ve seen a decrease in home sales.

I don’t have it on this side, but over the last three to four months, we’ve actually seen a gradual increase in inventory of homes for sale. It’s still very low, but that is gradually increasing. So, I think we’ve turned maybe a little bit of a corner. And I actually think that’s a good thing for the housing market. I mean, we’re still seeing home price appreciation of 15% to 20%.

Josh Cantwell: Crazy.

Daren Blomquist: Even with this slowdown. So, I mean, it’s really craziness, but because the affordability is worsening, I think that should cause buyers to react. And I have it in a couple of slides, but one of the leading indicators of buyer demand is buyer sentiment, where some of the surveys are put out in the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey. Homebuyers there, it’s on slide 6, I mean, this is actually pretty astounding to me. It’s the lowest since 1982.

Josh Cantwell: Wow!

Daren Blomquist: Folks, you say it’s a good time to buy a home, and that has dramatically dropped. As you can see, a year ago, people thought it was a great time to buy a home, actually, even in the midst of a pandemic, but that is dropping. It really has to do with people saying prices are too high, and they’re pulling back because prices are too high. So, I think that’s a leading indicator of demand. We’re going to continue to see home sales start to slide a little bit, and home price appreciation slow down over the next year.

Now, the one thing, I think I’ve said this before, but if we don’t see that play out kind of cooling of the housing market, then we’re definitely going to be in danger of forming another housing bubble. And I don’t know how that would happen, but I just saw a headline this week from Goldman Sachs predicting home prices will be up another 16% over the next year. And I think if that happens, we will be in dangerous territory. A lot of other economists are predicting more like, over the next year, home price appreciation will slow down to more like 3% to 5%. I think that’s a much better scenario for the long term, and if we see another 16% increase over the next year.

Josh Cantwell: I’d like to see 15% appreciation. I mean, I don’t mind. I sold off almost all my single-family rentals because we saw that appreciation. So, we’ve sold off a ton of them this year to just capture the equity and trade those into some apartment buildings, but when you see annual home price appreciation is 15%, and that’s the slowest pace in the last six months. Some scary numbers are good in some ways, but completely unsustainable over the long haul.

And this slide 5, which we had skipped over. Again, if you guys are catching this, just the audio version through a podcast where you get your podcasts, this is available on YouTube with the slides, go to the Accelerated Real Estate Investor YouTube channel, and you can see all the slides in the entire video presentation as well, which Daren does always such a fabulous job of collecting and then aggregating and then sharing this data and interpreting it. So, let’s touch base with this one last slide before we wrap up for today, about inventory. You mentioned that the new home inventory was up. Inventory is coming back, but still not nearly at where it used to be. So, let’s talk about that for a minute.

Daren Blomquist: Yes, I mean, both existing home inventory that has started to come up, but then new home inventory, which is really the only type of inventory that’s truly new inventory that’s definitely started to pick up. We saw a 32% increase year over year, and inventory of new homes for sale in August, and that’s now, the fourth consecutive month where we’ve seen that inventory increased. So, the builders have gotten on board and are building as fast as they can with all of the supply chain disruptions and all of that. So, supply is coming back on board or coming back a little bit on the new home supply, and so, I think this all ties into the argument, though, that we’ll see it cool down. We should see a cool-down in the housing market because, as we just talked about, demand is slowly decreasing due to affordability constraints.

And now, you have supply increasing. That should help, I think, get the market back to a little bit more of an equilibrium, a healthy equilibrium, where prices are not going up 20% a year, but going up more like 3% to 5% per year, yeah, and you also see inventory, instead of two months of inventory on the market, maybe more like six months of inventory in the market, which is historically considered kind of the equilibrium in the housing market. So, this supply coming online also points to that movement toward equilibrium over the next year.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, so again, there’s all these levers, and as we kind of run for third-year head for home kind of wrap up this particular edition of the podcast, this particular episode, which I’ll have Daren come back very soon here because there’s so much more to talk about, but the levers that Daren mentioned, so supply is getting up there, it’s coming back. That’s good because that’s going to even out the market. Secondly, interest rates need to go up. That will, again, bring some of the buyers, some of the property values back in check because people aren’t going to be willing to pay so much because their monthly payment is more, because the interest rate is higher. That would be a good thing to see the interest rates go up, so the market would slow down a little bit, that would be another lever, people getting back and gobbling up these jobs and having more buyers in the market. The more buyers in the market with good incomes means there are more people that can qualify for loans, although those loans should be more expensive because interest rates should go up. So, that would be good to have more people owning those homes and buying those homes, affordability, especially if they’re paid more because of inflation. The employers are willing to pay more for wages. Those wages, a lot of people to kind of stabilize their lives. I don’t think if these people get back to work, they’re immediately going to be buying homes, right? They have to have two years of solid income to qualify for a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loan. Just because these people go back to work, they’re not immediately put into the buyer pool of people buying homes, but it does, again, stabilize and normalize the market.

One thing that’s abundantly clear is that with a change in administration, and then COVID, that all this supply, we’re in a completely different place right now in October than we were two years ago when the election took place. And COVID hit, wish that it was a year later, the election took place. We are in a completely different place. I think it’s the upheaval, the change that people are starting to get unsettled with, right? Now, you’re starting to talk about, hey, there’s also all of this possible developer debt in China that these people might not be able to pay.

Well, remember, it was Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns that took down the original US housing market that reverberated throughout the entire world economy. So, we can’t be blind to the fact that China has 65 million housing units that are unoccupied, they have a huge glut and developers that can’t afford their bills. That stuff will probably reverberate into our economy at some point in the next couple of years. So, the faster we can stabilize and normalize our own economy and get ready for some reverberation from other economies, the better.

So, Daren, listen, fabulous discussion today. I’ve got to have you back as soon as possible. Thanks so much for sharing this information. Now, again, tell my audience every time, they’ve got to go to Auction.com/inthenews, which is Daren’s basically media portal, if you will, where they put out all kinds of reports and posts and data that you guys have to download. Register for that, opt-in on their website. And, of course, go to Auction.com to look for inventory and properties. Next time Daren comes back, we’re going to talk more about the eviction moratoriums, the foreclosure moratorium, and the amount of supply that’s going to be coming back on the Auction.com portal to show you guys places where you can buy more properties using the Auction.com tools that are available. Daren, any other place that people should go on your website to get data or any other kind of freebies, if you will, or places or things they should get?

Daren Blomquist: Well, yeah, of course, you can always go, there’s no cost to go and search, actually, search for properties, and we do have a little sneak peek at our next podcast is that we are seeing inventory start to come back on the foreclosure side. So, you can do a search. You don’t have to register anything until you actually bid. And then, one of the things, if you look in the news section, we just recently posted a video. I actually came, I should have said, “Hi Josh.” I mean, I flew out to Dayton, Ohio, and we spent some time with one of our buyers there who’s buying distressed properties and rehabbing them and flipping them. And we have a video of that experience and just what she’s doing in the community there. And so, that would be a great thing for your audience to check out someone who’s actually doing this on the ground there, and it happens to be in Ohio.

Josh Cantwell: Nice. Love it. Yeah, check out that video. Again, they can find that at Auction.com/inthenews. That obviously, as well as all the reports, a lot of this information that Daren and I are sharing on the podcast today, the YouTube video today is available there at Auction.com/inthenews. So, Daren, listen, thanks again. You’re always such a wealth of information, knowledge. And I look forward to this because it just so helped me prepare for what could be coming down the pipe. So, thank you for being on today, and I look forward to having you on the next episode here very shortly.

Daren Blomquist: Thanks so much, Josh. I really appreciate it.