#1265 Lance Lambert | The Housing Market Is Completely Broken

Lance Lambert is the co-founder, editor-in-chief, & CEO of ResiClub, a brand new media publication that I co-founded with Lance to cover residential real estate. In this conversation, we talk about housing affordability, how we got here, why it’s so bad, impact of interest rates, specific market analysis of what’s hot & what’s not, potential solutions, and what Lance is building with ResiClub. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Auradine, a leader in web infrastructure solutions including blockchain, AI, and privacy, has unveiled the world's first 4nm Bitcoin mining systems, featuring breakthrough EnergyTune™ technology, setting new standards in performance and energy efficiency. The Teraflux™ product line from Auradine offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO), positioning it as the optimal choice for Bitcoin mining needs. With EnergyTune™, a patent-pending technology, Auradine's Teraflux™ systems enable rapid demand response and optimal energy usage, fostering a symbiotic relationship with electrical grids, and contributing to sustainable energy practices. Designed and manufactured in the US, Auradine's Teraflux™ product line not only ensures cutting-edge technology but also mitigates supply chain risks and provides increased supply chain resiliency. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.auradine.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information the Teraflux bitcoin mining systems. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Lance Lambert is the co-founder, editor in chief, and CEO of Resi Club, a brand new media publication that I co-founded with Lance to cover residential real estate. In this conversation, we talk about housing affordability, how we got here, why it's so bad,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  what the impact of interest rates are, the specific market analysis of what's hot and what's not. Where do we go from here? What the potential solutions are? And what exactly Lance is building with Resi Club today? I always enjoy talking to Lance. He is the foremost expert when it comes to residential real estate in the entire country. And this conversation does nothing but deliver facts, insights, and all the information you need to better understand what's happening and why housing affordability has deteriorated so much in the United States. Here is my conversation with Lance Lampert.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:14Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Lance here with me. Lance, housing affordability is the worst it's been in 40 years. What exactly is going on and why has housing become so untouchable for so many Americans?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, housing affordability is really getting pressurized right now, and it's been deteriorating, not just, you know, the past few months, but the past few years. And the speed that this has happened, this is the fastest deterioration in housing affordability ever. And the actual level of housing affordability now is at lows, three decade lows, right? We are not that far off from when mortgage rates affordability wise, we're not that far off from when mortgage rates were 18% in the early 80s. And that's because house prices relative to incomes are

• 5:19Speaker 02

  just so stretched right now. And so when you look at the numbers, for somebody who would go out and get a mortgage today, their payment for the typical buyer is 120% more than somebody who bought at the two and a half years ago during the pandemic frenzy. And so somebody could have bought during the height of the pandemic frenzy in 2021, they could have bought two homes and had the same monthly payment as somebody buying one home today. The the speed that we've deteriorated is just historic. And so what's happened here

• 5:58Speaker 02

  is there's two things. One, during the pandemic, we had a historic overheating on the price side. So national house prices from March 2020 to June 2022 went up about 44% nationally. Some markets like Austin and Boise, yeah, it was close to 70%. It was just a historic frenzy. And then following that overheating on prices, the Fed went into the fastest rate hiking cycle in four decades. And so mortgage rates went from the lowest all time in January

• 6:36Speaker 02

  2021 of 2.65%. And then slowly by the end of 2021, it went up to three. But then entering 2022, they went from 3% to 4% to 5% to 6% to 7% by November 2022.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And then now they've ticked up a little higher where now this as of today going into this call, we are sitting at the highest average 30 year fixed mortgage rate of 8.03 for the mortgage news daily. That's the highest since late 2000. So mortgage rates have just cooked and we've went from a two something handle to an eight something handle and affordability has just gotten pressurized across the country. And that mortgage rate move, that's for everybody. Everybody across the country has seen that deterioration on the right, on the right side.

• 7:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when we talk about housing affordability, obviously people immediately think of home prices and if prices are going up and the cost of capital is going up, that is a major factor. You mentioned pay the payments that people receive their income. How does that play into this calculation? And is it something where if housing prices and the cost of capital stayed where it was, but all of a sudden everyone got a, you know, 100% pay raise, then affordability would go down. And so there's almost like two sides to the equation. Or is it really the only solution here is we have to get housing prices to go back down, the cost of capital to go back down to make this something that's more tenable for the average American?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So housing affordability is three numbers. It's incomes, it's prices and it's rates. And so two of the levers have worked at rapid speed against buyers and that's prices and rates and incomes just can't move at the rate that those two did during the pandemic. And so heading forward to relax affordability, you would need either rates to come down or income growth to exceed house price growth. Or, or you know, you could actually have house prices fall too. That's another way to improve it. But incomes either need to rise, prices fall,

• 8:51Speaker 02

  or rates rise, or the relative speed of incomes outpace the other two. That would improve affordability. The problem is historically speaking,

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Deteriorations in affordability happen much faster than improvements in affordability. It usually takes a long time to play out. And housing does move slowly, but the trend the past three years has been deterioration. And we haven't seen an affordability improvement. And to go back, you know, at the, when we entered the pandemic on a historical basis, that was one of the most affordable housing markets ever for a new buyer was 2020. And even though prices the previous decade had went up a lot, rates were still kind of low. And prices relative to every, or incomes relative to everything, you know, was fairly solid. But now we're at the opposite end of the spectrum.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So we went from one of the most affordable housing markets three years ago to one of the most unaffordable in just three years.

• 9:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, let's talk about interest rates. Obviously, the Federal Reserve in November of 2021, they were like, oh, boy, things have gotten hot around here. We want to destroy demand was a phrase that they continued to use over and over again. As they began to hike interest rates, they definitely destroyed investment demand in stocks, in cryptocurrency, in commodities, et cetera. Housing wasn't a big part of that conversation initially. Now we're talking about housing affordability. And so how much weight does the Fed put on housing affordability? When it's making some of these interest rate decisions? They claim not to care about the stock market or some of these other investment classes. Do they actually incorporate housing affordability? When they decide, should they raise interest rates or should they not?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so last year, a series of papers came out from the Fed. And we've started to see just how concerned they've been with housing. So the first paper showed that of the price appreciation during the pandemic, 60% of it was, could be attributed to the work from home effect and the demand for more housing space. And so how that works is it's not just people relocating, but it's also the fact that people who stay in these markets like New York, San Francisco, and all these places, they want more space because they're at home more, right? So that elevated demand for space happened nationwide and that helped to overheat prices. That's the first paper.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  The second paper is a paper that found. And that first one is from the San Francisco Fed, if you want to Google it. The second paper found that during the pandemic, housing demand increased so fast that supply would have needed to move up 300% to match the elevated housing demand that occurred during the pandemic, and that just wasn't possible. So really, what happened during the pandemic is that the elevation in housing demand could never get met. There was just never enough supply for it to get met. And so what happens when the actual market demand exceeds the supply? Price overheating, and that's what happened during the pandemic.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  And the third paper, and this one might be the most interesting, is that this rapid increase in housing wealth, which occurred, you know, 45% move up in prices in under 24 months, and a lot of that went to the already wealthiest segment of the population, those over 50. What it created was a tremendous wealth effect. And the Fed calculates, the Board of Fed Governors calculates that one-third of all non-housing inflation was caused by the boom in housing. So that's both from the wealth effect, and that's from the boom in the housing sector.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  And so, and you could see this when the Fed started the rate hike. Neel Kashkari would go out and talk about how, you know, there's so much home equity, and that was a concern. And so I think one of the reasons that the Fed went into the rate hikes at the speed that it did, wasn't that it necessarily was concerned that inflation was going to rip even faster, like the, you know, it was already out of the gate, and I think they knew it was kind of going to decelerate. But I think one of the reasons they went into the rate hikes so aggressively so early is that they knew that that would push the long-term tail of the market, the 10-year Treasury, 30-year fixed mortgage rates, up really fast. And so what happened is because

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Mortgage rates went from three percent to seven percent within six, seven months last year. Nobody did home equity. Uh, nobody was tapping into home equity. Nobody was doing the cash. There was fewer of the cash out refinances. Because one of the Fed's fears was that one, because home prices have went up so fast. If people were grabbing that equity, that could have triggered even more growth in consumer demand and inflation. And so they've kind of taken that out of, they've taken that off the table for a bit. Because mortgage rates have went up so fast. I mean, really, the only way you're doing a cash out refi at seven percent, giving up your three percent mortgage rate four for a seven, is if you're in financial distress.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  You're not doing it because, you know, you want to remodel your kitchen, you want to go buy an in-ground pool. Uh, but had they not rate, rate hiked as fast as they did, let's say they only got, you know, mortgage rates up to four or five by the end of last year. There would have been even more of that cash out refi. So I do think that home prices and the aggressiveness that they moved up during the pandemic really mattered for the Fed. Now, in terms of their Fed goals, um, you know, the most important is rents. And we are seeing a deceleration on the multifamily side. There's a lot of supply coming in. The single-family rental side has stayed a little stronger. Um, now, in terms of home prices, they've been a bit resilient nationally.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And I think the Fed, you know, would have probably liked home prices to come down a bit more. Uh, but I think based on comments that the Richmond Fed made, Fed President made three weeks ago. They're kind of saying, okay, yeah, home prices haven't come down more. But it's probably because of secular shift in the economy where people just want more housing now. Uh, because we've gone to a world where we're less in the office, more at home, people want more space. And so there's kind of a, you know, a, a trade-off where we're kind of accepting that home prices are probably going to be a little more elevated in this environment.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  But what he did say is that, okay, if we're in an environment where there's more secular demand for housing, and so prices are going to stay higher there, then on a relative basis, price has got to give up somewhere else in the economy. And, uh, you know, I, I think the place that that's happening obviously is commercial real estate.

• 16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when we go and we look at some of these specific markets, there really is a kind of a tale of two, right? And what you've broken down multiple times on Twitter and in the email is this idea that Austin, Texas is down 10% from September 2022 to September 2023. And they seem to be one of the worst kind of recipients of a lot of this problem. But then there's places like Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut, and many others that are actually up in terms of home prices in that same time period. And so when you look at the United States, what is driving certain markets down, but at the same time, certain markets are going up? Is there a way to kind of understand this bifurcation

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  in terms of why different markets are responding in a different way to the same exact interest rate hikes?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So during the pandemic, homes across the country, with not a lot of exceptions, boomed, right? Prices ripped everywhere. Now, there were the markets that ripped even harder, places like Austin, Boise, that really saw the work from home effect. A lot of people with California money coming in, New York money. And the thing is about California money and even to some degree, New York money, is that it, you know, it's kind of honey badger money. It just doesn't care. And so there, you know, and if, and if your marginal buyer in your market is California money and New York money, prices are probably going to rip.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  And so that's what happened in those markets. And they kind of got over their skis. And so when mortgage rates spiked last year, because prices in those markets, which had went up 70% in two years, they were already getting to the point where it was pricing out a lot of locals, right? But then, once mortgage rates spiked, and you kind of took away the affordability lure from some of these places like New York and California, plus some offices were reopening, people were kind of rethinking this abrupt lifestyle shift.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  That set those markets up for perfect correction modes or like a perfect storm for a correction mode. And you know, the corrections there haven't been like too, too intense. According to most of the numbers I look at, Zillow or Austin from the peak is down somewhere between 12 and 15%. Boise is down like 10 to 12%. So they've given up, you know, the tops of the pandemic, but still up, you know, 40 something percent from the start of the pandemic. So anyone who bought in those markets before the pandemic or early, you know, they're still very much in the green. Now, what we have seen is that despite mortgage rates moving from three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

• 18:59Speaker 02

  there are some markets across the country that are still up 10% year over year. And a lot of those are in Connecticut and a lot of those are in New Jersey and Midwestern markets. And what's going on, I believe, is that a lot of people who were maybe in the New York market are starting to realize, you know what? Work from home isn't probably going to be 100%. I probably need to be close, but they're also realizing, hey, I only need to go in one, two, three days. And so it's creating a bit of more of a donut effect around the greater New York market. Where Connecticut and New Jersey are getting hotter and as people kind of chase relative affordability. And so that's pushed those markets up despite mortgage rates being close to 80.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  In the Midwest, it's a bit of a different story. What it is there is that if you look at the numbers across the country, it's very hard to cash flow in a lot of Western markets and a lot of even Southern markets now because prices have went up so high, so fast. And so if you're the institutional investors or mom and pop investors who want to buy homes, it just doesn't make a lot of sense in San Francisco. And so right now for every one investor buying in San Francisco, there's two selling. So they're net sellers in a lot of these Western markets. But in the Midwest, you can still go buy single family homes at the bottom third of the market, the cash flow.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  So people are still buying these homes, the cash flow, investors are still pushing into the market and prices are still moving up.

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when we look at some of the markets that it's really bad, either home prices are going down, or the mortgage rates are creating so much pain that builders now are stepping in and saying, hey, wait a second, maybe we can actually provide a solution. You wrote a piece recently that said Lennar is basically offering a fixed 4.75% mortgage rate. And so if mortgage rates are at 7, 8%, how is Lennar offering, you know, something that's closer to 4.5% or 5%?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a lot of these builders during the pandemic, while they were all crying about supply chains and not being able to find workers, there was also the fact that their profit margins hit the highest ever during the pandemic. And so their margins were huge. So when mortgage rates spiked last year and sales started to crater, and I'm talking sales, not prices, when sales began to crater, once builders had kind of worked through their backlogs a little bit and made sure that, you know, the cancellations weren't going to be too high from the people they had already sold to, what they started to do is they took those margins and started slashing them. And

• 21:45Speaker 02

  they took that money and did things like mortgage rate buy downs. So buying down somebody's rate, often it's, you know, like a 3-2-1 buy down, where your first year is like a 4, your next year is a 5%, then it's 6%, and then maybe it gets to 7, and that's your term rate. And then, you know, some of them are even, you know, way, way further out than just the 3-2-1s. And they also did things like money at close, and things like that, or just outright price cuts, in the case of like KB Homes. But they had the margins to play with. And then, once they did that, they were able to

• 22:25Speaker 02

  get sales going again. And heading into this year, you know, the first several months of the year, as the market started to stabilize a bit, builders saw new home sales really move up fairly quickly. Now, what started to happen since then is that mortgage rates have went up higher. Now, Eight percent and we're starting to see the market demand is starting to crack more. And my assumption is that I think there's going to be more downward pressure on home builders margins heading forward. Um, and they'll probably have to do other types of incentives. And they're just gonna have to, you know, be clever.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Now, one very big divide that's happening in housing is that the big publicly traded builders who are like really close with lenders are doing more of the incentives. The smaller private builders who don't have the connections with the lenders as much, maybe don't have the margins of the big boys. They're hurting a little more, um, some of them relative to some of the bigger builders. Now, all of this, keep in mind, vary substantially by market and even sometimes community by community basis. And there are some new home markets where they've seen very little corrections. KB Home CEO told me that, you know, the inland empire

• 23:50Speaker 02

  uh, area out in California, which is an area where a lot of people who are in LA, who are seeking affordability go to. They haven't really seen much adjustment, had to make much adjustments there at all. But a market like Denver where resale to new home to resale prices were got up to thirty percent during the height of the pandemic. And so what that means is KB Homes usually but on a zip code level charge a prices their homes, new homes fifteen percent higher than existing prices. There's a premium to buy a new home. During the pandemic, because they could charge whatever the hell they wanted, it got up to thirty percent in that market for new home builders.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  So in Denver in particular, the new home market has had to see more of a correction and then more of a slump. Just because their prices got over their skis and once mortgage rates spiked, they had to, you know, do some affordability adjustments.

• 24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do we go from here? Right? Obviously, housing affordability is the worst that it's been in decades. People still want and need to buy a home. There's complexities with the monetary policy. There's complexities with construction and supply chains that we kind of are now getting to the other side of. How do you see this working out? And is there a world where we can return back to housing being affordable in the United States? Or is this kind of a new normal that we should expect to persist for, you know, the coming years?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think what's probably true is that we are going to be in a place where on a historical basis, affordability is probably deteriorated for housing. Housing, historically speaking, when it moves into these bands, whether it's, you know, the more affordable market or the less affordable market, it usually stays for a while and it takes a while to kind of play out. The last time that we got here into this this band of really deteriorated affordability was 05-06. And the way we got out of it is that the Fed and the economy made people poorer. That's one.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Wages and what happened is prices crashed. There was GFC. And that, that obviously is not ideal. We would, I don't think we'd like to replay GFC. And, you know, this time the lever down on prices isn't quite there like it was last time, where you had, you know, a huge amount of inventory on the market. You had all these terrible mortgage products, the subprime crisis. But I think what I'm keeping an eye on is a couple of things for affordability. Is I'm keeping an eye on one, how does this rate cycle play out?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  If we go into a recession, there's probably a good chance that mortgage rates come down a bit. And that would of course improve affordability. That's one. Two, some markets are probably still at risk of correction mode. And it's possible that markets that have avoided correction could still slide into correction. If you are a Resi Club premium subscriber, I track this data for you. But what we're starting to see is markets like San Antonio and New Orleans have really softened. Although they held up a bit stable last year as mortgage rates started to go up. So it's possible we could be in a period where there's some rolling corrections.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Where last year, Austin and Boise and Phoenix and Reno all took a hit. And then this year, you know, Phoenix kind of stabilized, Las Vegas and Reno a bit too. And then, you know, Austin's still taking, they're still very much in correction mode. But now places like San Antonio and New Orleans are kind of joining in with Austin and kind of giving up a bit more on price. So I'm keeping an eye on, one, the macro side of the economy. And how long does the labor market hold strong? And then that has huge implications for mortgage rates. And then two, I'm watching the market fundamentals down to the inventory active listing level.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  To kind of see if more markets are at risk of corrections.

• 28:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you mentioned Resi Club. I think it's no secret. I think that you are the number one residential real estate journalist in the country. You've been on this show before and we decided to go and do something about the problem. And we've both together launched Resi Club. Talk a little bit about what that business is, what is the product and kind of what your vision for Resi Club is over the coming years?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think both of us kind of were in agreement that this issue is, you know, it's one of the biggest issues in the country, not just from a financial economy aside, but just a countryside. You know, it's the fact that, you know, so many people who are doing all of the right things in their life, they're struggling to get into homeownership. And this issue is going to be prolonged for a bit. And so what we've done is we've created Resi Club, which is not only tracking housing affordability, what's going on on the supply side, you know, all the movements in mortgage rates, but it's also really getting down to,

• 29:25Speaker 02

  you know, the what's actually happening in these individual markets with the housing analytics. And some of it's creative that we built. You know, a lot of real estate agents like to say that anything with six months of inventory or less is a seller's market. Well, here's the thing, home prices in Austin last year started to crater. You know, there was a flash crash when supplies, when months of supply was only at two months. That two months of supply should tell you that that market is red hot, but it wasn't. Now, our data flagged it because we watch absorption and the speed of inventory change. And so

• 30:09Speaker 02

  we knew that Austin had moved into correction mode right out of the gate. And so really great housing analytics, but we're also talking to the biggest players in the country. You know, I talked to KB CEO, KB Home CEO frequently and other builders to kind of get a pulse on what's happening there. We talked to a lot of the institutional home buyers. I have a CEO interview coming out this weekend with Amherst CEO. He owns 44,000 homes in the US, his company. This guy has an incredible pulse on what's happening in the housing market and

• 30:50Speaker 02

  The reason he does and the reason he has so much data and has tracked every home in the country, every home in the country for 25 years is that, you know, his neck's on the line. You know, he has to know what's going on in the market in all of these places. And so I think what Resi Club is doing is we're really just shining a light on what's actually happening in the housing market. I think if you read a lot of these headlines, you know, some of them will talk about how, you know, you know, housing was doing so bad last year. Uh, and then this year talking about how home prices are up so much. But the truth be told is if you're in one of these markets that doesn't fit into that bucket,

• 31:34Speaker 02

  you're going to be confused. You're like, what the hell is going on reading these headlines? But I think if you read Resi Club, you're going to be like, okay, I understand. I have a, I have a sense of what's going on in the market. I understand that the very top of the market nationally is much cooler. While the bottom of the market uh is much warmer and the reason being when mortgage rates spike, people just shift their expectations and will be like, you know what? Maybe I don't need that home. I'll do this type of home. So it pushes competition down. Those are the types of things that we bring to the table.

• 32:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, one, one other aspect that I'm very excited about and, and people who have listened to this show for a long time will know, there's very few things that when they are put out into the world, I immediately stop and go read or, or listen to. Every single day when uh the next article comes out, I stop everything and go and read it. And I think it is to your point, probably one of the biggest problems facing America right now, right? You have 330 million people in our country, a good portion of them don't own homes but would like to, and they can't afford it. And so how do we go ahead and we change that? First, you got to understand the problem. A key part of understanding the problem, yes, there are the, the articles and that, but you have a bunch of data that you have at your fingertips.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Some of that you are actually sharing with subscribers to Resi Club in terms of these inventory trackers and, and things like that. So maybe talk a little bit about the data that you have. And then also the access to individuals and some of the exclusive interviews and things that people just won't be able to find anywhere else or get access to anywhere else.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a couple of things. And one other point is, this isn't just a great place for people who want to buy homes. It's also a good place for people who want to sell their home and maybe move. You know, there's a fact that, you know, there's not much churn happening in the market right now. Fewer homeowners are selling their home to go buy something new right now than we've seen in 30 plus years. And the reason is that affordability is so cooked and they don't want to give up their 2, 3, 4% mortgage rate and go get an 8% mortgage rate. So I think there's a lot of people who would, it would be good for them to read Resi Club because they might start to understand, you know, when mortgage rates might begin to move over,

• 33:54Speaker 02

  roll over and, you know, that helps with their lifestyles decision. The other thing is with the analytics, you know, we're getting tons of data that we're scraping in from Zillow, from Realtor.com, from Freddie Mac. You know, a lot of these big places and big names in real estate data. And a lot of this data is out there and scrapable. But the problem is it isn't put into a format that's actually readable and digestible. And so that's what we're doing with Resi Club in particular for the people who upgrade to Resi Club Pro, where we're going to have analytics for inventory and prices, not just at a metro level, not just at a county level, but down to a zip code level.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  And we're going to have the things like the stuff that, you know, helps to figure out the

• 34:45Speaker 02

  absorption rates by market. Because the problem is the months of supply just isn't as strong of a metric as the industry thinks in a period where affordability has deteriorated this fast and to this degree. And so we have some special sauce metrics that we think help to read this particular environment. And then the other thing is we have a lot of access to executives in the real estate space. And one reason that we do for a publication that's only two weeks old is they are interested in our data. They're interested in what we're hearing. They want to know what we're hearing from other executives because the truth here is this is one of the most uncertain environments

• 35:30Speaker 02

  for housing that we've been in in 15 years. You know, executives in this space have watched us take so many quick 180s that they are in a, you know, in a mindset where they're trying to figure out what's going on. They want to know what other people think across the country in the industry. And so I think Resi Club is well positioned for this uncertain environment and this environment where housing data just can't be read in traditional ways. And I think we're stepping up to the plate with ways to actually read the data and, you know, get

• 36:09Speaker 02

  the best insights in a period that's so uncertain and with such deteriorated affordability.

• 36:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. I'm super excited about this and already I think the response that we've seen from people speaks to just how much demand there is for this information. You've been doing a fantastic job. If anyone would like, they can subscribe. You can just go to resi club, R E S I club analytics.com and you can subscribe there. There are five pieces of content that go out every single week completely for free. And then if you want, you can subscribe as well. And there's a bunch of exclusive interviews and kind of premium content as well. So resi club analytics.com is where you can go do that. Lance, maybe I'll leave you with the last word here in terms of, does it get worse before it gets better? You know, I think that's really what people want to understand is

• 37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  just like, how do you look at if somebody's sitting there and they're trying to figure out, should I sell? Should I not? What do I do? Like, what is that framework maybe that you'd walk them through in terms of trying to make personal decisions on, you know, what housing is going to do and how it could affect them?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So last year mortgage rates moved up to 7%. Prices gave just a little bit nationally. And I think there was a feeling that, okay, we've seen the worst of the affordability.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  And then we came into this year and national prices moved up more. We set a new all time high this summer and then rates went even higher to 8%. So as we are doing this call right now, this is the worst affordability in like 35 years. And, and so I would love to sit here and say that, you know, the worst is over and, you know, it, you know, it's all, you know, a slow grind to improvement from here on out. We don't, we can't say that with certainty, especially the way the bond market has been acting with this recent sell off that's pushed up yields and pushed up mortgage rates. But I think what I can tell you is that Resi

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Club is going to be all over it. Whatever does begin to happen, whatever trends start to manifest and the trends that are already manifesting, we're going to be covering it and all the subscribers will be getting details every single day through, through the weekday.

• 38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Lance, I appreciate it very much. You're going to be on here much more often now and we'll be covering kind of the housing on affordability, mortgage rates and much, much more. So anyone who is not following you on Twitter, at News Lambert is a great place to go. Subscribe to Resi Club and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Okay. Thanks, Anthony.