I want to point out some divergent information out there – between the national trends and some local observers. Nationally, we continue to see an undersupply of housing. Look at the charts at the top of the WSJ Daily Shot for January 31 and let the following national data sink in: home-prices have been climbing at over twice the rate of wage-growth, and three times the rate of inflation. Housing inventories are above their Great Recession trough, but are no where near their pre-recession levels. Rental vacancies are near multi-year lows.

Now look at one source of local data. The City’s Comprehensive Planning Advisory Committee received informationabout future Lubbock population levels. That information included a 40+ year Compound Annual Growth Rate of 1.2%. (We can argue over whether data from the 1970s should receive the same weigh as data since the Millennium, but alas.) The report pegged a nominal need for housing units at a 1,650-per-year for the next 20 years (and pointed out that we’d exceeded 2,000-per-year for the last two years.) It’s not hard to infer a message from that report that we are in the midst of being over-built.(That certainly does not square with what I’ve written in the past about Months-of-Inventory trends in the MLS over the same several years.)

Looking at our unscientific measure of development-associated parties with multiple transactions in the month of January 2018, we find 110 transactions.  See the attached data. This is in-line with what we’ve seen over the last Quarter. If we are in our own tiny-bubble, it’s not showing up in our measure yet.