What I'm Reading No Vacancy: Apartment vacancies hit another low in September, according to RealPage, declining to 2.7%, with rents hitting all-time highs. Globe Street A point of interest here is lender underwriting. One thing that has kept the market (sort of) in check is that multifamily properties are typically...
October 8th – Substitution Effect
What I'm Reading Substitution Effect: Construction material shortages are forcing homebuilders and contractors to turn to substitutes and hunt for alternative suppliers as they rush to meet high demand for new housing. However, its a double-edged sword and swapping out materials to minimize delays can add to costs. Wall Street...
October 7th – Shop Shop
What I'm Reading Chop Shop: The latest investment trend is buying tiny pieces of everything from real estate and cars, to art, fine wine and memorabilia. Vox Looking Inward: Foreign investors are following in the footsteps of their domestic counterparts, focusing on secondary markets with strong fundamentals over their traditional...
October 6th – Thin Air
What I'm Reading Thin Air: Mortgage payments are getting more unaffordable as record home price growth erases savings delivered by historically low interest rates. Wall Street Journal The affordability problem will continue to get worse if / when interest rates continue to rise. Borrowers have record equity in their homes...
October 5th – Honey Badger
What I'm Reading Staying Remote: PriceWaterhouseCoopers is freeing the entirety of its U.S. workforce to work remotely full-time, a decision that will impact 40,000 client services workers. The Real Deal In response, the CMBS markets did their best honey badger impression. Will be interesting to watch this one play out: ...
October 4th – No Takers
What I'm Reading No Takers: Spurred on by the Biden Administration, the Port of Long Beach began offering a pilot program offering 24-hour container operations over two weeks ago. To date, not a single trucker has taken advantage of it. The reason? Burdensome requirements (of course). Wall Street Journal On...
October 1st – Pointing Fingers
What I'm Reading Pointing Fingers: Frustrations are boiling over at the Ports of LA and Long Beach as freight continues to pile up. Truckers are pointing fingers at a lack of dock help to offload ships. Port officials are pointing to a struck driver shortage. The only thing that both...
September 30th – Overreaction
What I'm Reading Overreaction: The feared tsunami of evictions predicted when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on evictions in August has failed to materialize. In fact, the number of filings have dropped or remained flat since the decision. Washington Post It’s almost as if they relied on...
September 29th – Shots Fired
What I'm Reading Shots Fired: The SEC is targeting a crowdfunding portal in its first enforcement action in the space. Regulators sued the operator of a funding portal, TruCrowd Inc., for allegedly failing to heed red flags despite allegedly being told that one of the key players had a criminal...
September 28th – Hoarding?
What I'm Reading Hoarding: Panicked American shippers may be overbuying goods in an attempt to build inventory to provide a cushion in the event of another global crisis. They are making the current container crisis worse. Splash Its Bad Everywhere: There are over 60 container ships full of import cargo...