housing

Housing prices are up a crazy amount since COVID began. As I’ve said before, given mortgage rates, housing is still pretty affordable. Regardless if you agree with that or not, it doesn’t matter with no inventory available.

Inventory is still running well below pre-COVID levels. In fact, inventory is now at an all time low.

Until there is more inventory, house prices will continue to rise dramatically.

Housing has been on fire the last 18 months. Part of that run up is due to corporations coming into the market and buying in mass. Zillow was one of them. Whelp, somehow 2/3 of their buys are underwater. Oops.

Zillow has close to $3 billion in houses that it now needs to liquidate. How it is underwater on this many homes when the market is up 20% I have no idea. But it leads to two questions:

1. Is this the tip of the iceberg in terms of large investors getting to aggressive?
2. I’m guessing those Zillow estimates aren’t worth the bits they are stored in.