Early year predictions: We will continue to experience an existing home inventory constriction through 2020. We will experience an upsurge in subdivision plats in advance of the City’s adoption of an Impact Fee system. We will see moderate residential refinance...

What do we know about the general trend of housing to close out 2019? In a tweet thread Nobel-laureate economist and NYT commentator Paul Krugman takes on an argument that housing price gains relates primarily to low mortgage rates. He points out a basic economic...

I struggled with an approach to this month’s blog. Economic news is getting swallowed up by politics, and that is not likely to abate with the election season coming on. So I was happy to have home builders come to the rescue! Cutting through the noise, the National...

In one signal, the national housing market showed a continued trend of moderate YoY improvement. See this article noting a 3.2% increase in the Case-Schiller National Home Price Index; a similar increase to the prior month numbers. But note the gathering clouds? Black...

Apologies for the tardiness of the August report. We’ve been doing some under-the-hood work. To make it up to you, I’m including Movers Moving Indexes for August AND September. Looking to Year-Over-Year MLS data for Lubbock, in September 2019 we saw a 17.7% decrease...

I’ve written about how this housing expansion feels different from past expansions. I read a post today that might explain that feeling. While I’ve pointed at the interplay of input costs and labor, the post’s charts, and the corresponding analysis, posit that there...

People like fast reads in the summer, so I’ll keep it short. Local MLS data through the end of July 2019 showed supply constraint on Existing Home sales. Months-of-Inventory sat at 2.5, with total listings pegged at 1170. Compared YoY, that is over 200 fewer listings,...

May gives us mixed signals. We know that nationally, home builders are viewing the moment with confidence. We know from local MLS data that we are climbing the seasonal wave towards our usual Summer peak. But we also know that YoY May gave us a decrease of 2.7% in...

Let’s start wide. I know this is the April report, but econ data lags. (Math is hard.) On a national-basis, it appears YoY prices increased 3.7% in March. See here. CoreLogic further projects a 4.8% increase (YoY) for April. At least one industry economist is drawing...

Simon Johnson is an economics professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, a former Chief Economist at the IMF, and a well-known blogger at BaselineScenario.com. You can draw your own conclusions about where he lands politically, in part based on his publishing...